Vaccine Combats Some Breast Cancers

Strategies to treat cancer by harnessing the human immune system have been pursued for decades, but they never have improved patient outcomes meaningfully. In particular, vaccines have been — and continue to be — developed to combat a variety of malignant disorders, including breast cancer. Although some vaccines have been evaluated in patients with metastatic breast cancer, immune responses to vaccines are more likely to provide clinical benefit when tumor burdens are modest. When vaccines are evaluated in breast cancer patients following stem-cell transplantation and conventional adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, researchers consistently identify immune responses in such patients, but few data suggest that disease recurrence is lowered.

In a…