By Melinda Dodd
The Cleveland Clinic announced a possible breakthrough—but is a breast cancer vaccine too good to be true?
It’s something generations of women could only dream about: a cancer vaccine that keeps malignant cells from taking hold in the breast, and stops tumors in their tracks. Announced earlier this week by the Cleveland Clinic, the proposed breast-cancer vaccine contains a small amount of alpha-lactalbumin, a protein that researchers say is present in the majority of breast tumors. The vaccine is intended to create an immune response in your body that should help you beat back breast cancer. But does it work?
Immunologist Vincent Tuohy, PhD., of the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, is leading the research, which draws on studies from the 1980s that have established a link between breast cancer and alpha-lactalbumin. In one experiment, his team vaccinated young mice with a genetic propensity for breast cancer, then waited eight months to see if tumors developed. They didn’t. When they vaccinated another group of mice with existing tumors, the tumors shrank. By contrast, mice that had an equally high risk for the disease, but received a sham vaccine, saw their cancers blossom. Read more…
