As Research Progresses, Breast Cancer Vaccine Likely Years Away

Although great strides have been made in research for breast cancer vaccines, such a vaccine is likely years away from commercial availability, as an expert explained in an interview with CURE.

As part of the “Speaking Out” video series, in partnership with the Cancer Vaccine Coalition, CURE sat down with Keith Knutson, a cancer vaccine researcher with Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida. Knutson holds a Ph.D. in pharmacology.

“One of the things that we've learned through the years that we've been investigating vaccines for breast cancer is that it's not one size fits all,” Knutson said.

As he explained, breast cancer is a very heterogeneous disease with several subtypes, “so we're not going to come up with a vaccine that we can just give to everybody with breast cancer — at least at this point — and be able to get that into the marketplace.”

Instead, Knutson said, researchers need to try to understand which particular vaccine works for each individual subtype of breast cancer and then determine how it fits into the clinical treatment picture of a given patient.

“Where can we immunize these individuals along the course of the treatment so that we can measure an effect?” he said. “So, unlike an infectious disease vaccine, where we're just looking at [whether] it [prevents] the disease from occurring in the first place — like a flu shot, for example, did it prevent flu? — we're asking the questions: Does it have an impact on the survival of an individual? Does it have an impact on recurrence in an individual? Does it have an impact on disease progression?

“Those are the kinds of things that we need to work out. We're learning more about those [questions], and as we design our clinical trials, we're going to have to advance across the same strategy that other types of treatment for cancer advance, and that's through phase 1, phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials.”

As researchers’ knowledge continues to increase, Knutson said, he expects that more clinical trials will be informative of which vaccines to advance.

“I think it's going to be several more years before we have that understanding,” he said. “But what's important is that we keep on trying to apply the new technologies that we have to develop new vaccines and trying to understand how best they fit into the clinical picture of breast cancer.

“That's going to come someday, but it's only going to come with funding and real ambition on the part of advocates, scientists and others in the community to push forward with developing these novel types of treatments.”

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