NeuVax: Experimental Breast Cancer Vaccine

According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 182,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed this year with breast cancer. An experimental breast cancer vaccine, called NeuVax, could help reduce the risk of recurrence and death in women by 50 percent.

The vaccine works by stimulating the immune system to recognize the cancer as a foreign body, thus fighting the tumor growth. NeuVax, also known as E75, is designed to treat women with tumors that generate a protein called HER-2. In these cases, which account for approximately 25 percent of breast cancer patients, tumors tend to grow faster and are more likely to recur than tumors that do not carry the protein. The small clinical trial conducted by researchers at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas included 163 women, some whose tumors generated low levels of HER-2 as well as women with high levels of the protein.

After 30 months, the vaccine not only significantly reduced the risk of recurrence in those with high expression of the HER-2 protein, but reduced the mortality rate by half. Even more impressive is that, for the women with breast cancer having low or intermediate levels of HER-2, the vaccine lowered the mortality rate by 100 percent. These women are not eligible for Herceptin, an expensive antibody-based drug, which is the current treatment for women with this type of cancer.

“We now have something we think works in the majority of women with breast cancer who are currently underserved,” said Dr. George Peoples, chief of surgical oncology at Brooke Army Medical Center and director of the Cancer Vaccine Development Program at the U.S. Military Cancer Institute. “It’s also very, very well-tolerated, like a flu shot.”

According to Linda Benavides, the study’s lead author, a Phase III trial of NeuVax is planned which will involve between 700 and 1,000 women with tumors generating low levels of HER-2. Benavides says the experimental vaccine offers a “very simplistic approach” in targeting HER-2 and added that it would be “very cheap to mass produce.”

Other cancer vaccines have been tested with little success, most of which were used to treat tumors that had already spread.