data from a Phase I safety trial of their vaccine, which involved 66 women with advanced stage breast cancer. The women had undergone treatment that either put their cancer into complete remission or largely contained it, but they remained at high risk of it aggressively reemerging. The volunteers were tracked for a median length of about 10 years.
In the trial, the vaccine showed no signs of serious long-term health risks, with the most common side effects being acute and short-lasting symptoms like redness at the injection site and fever. The volunteers also developed the immune responses that researchers hoped the vaccine would generate. And though Phase I trials are not meant to prove that a treatment works—only that it is safe—there was a clearly encouraging indicator of its effectiveness.
The HER2 vaccine developed by Disis and her colleagues is far from the only one being studied at the UW Cancer Vaccine Institute, but it is the furthest along in clinical trials. And in many ways, it’s the culmination of 30 years of work by Disis in particular.“I think the early challenge, years ago, was just that people didn’t think that the immune system played any role in cancer eradication,” she said.
“One of the other areas we’re working on is trying to increase the diversity of the patients that are represented in clinical trials—to make efforts to reach different parts of our community,” said Kiran Dhillon, executive director of the UW Cancer Vaccine Institute.
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