With the help of immune system-stimulating molecules that mimic bacterial components, researchers have used a type of cancer vaccine to both delay and prevent breast tumors in mice.
The strategy, they say, holds promise for the future use of peptide vaccines in women who are at high risk for developing breast cancer.
Researchers from the Mayo Clinic, University of South Florida, and University of Torino employed substances called toll-like receptor agonists to help a synthetic peptide vaccine raise the immune system response against breast cancer tumors. Simultaneously, they used antibodies to blunt other aspects of the immune system that might interfere with a strong killer T cell response, improving the effectiveness of the vaccine.
In the February 1 issue of Cancer Research, the researchers report that their strategy was effective in preventing spontaneous tumors in transgenic mouse models for breast cancer, even when the vaccine was given when the mice already had early stage cancer.
"The challenge is to get a foreign peptide recognized by the immune system as a threat so it can react and produce anti-tumor immune cells," said Esteban Celis, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the department of interdisciplinary oncology at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute at the University of South Florida in Tampa. "We've shown that stimulating the immune system using toll-like receptor agonists is very important to alerting it and producing lymphocytes that will have an anti-tumor effect."
According to Celis, the immune system usually doesn't react as strongly to a synthetic peptide in a vaccine as it does against an infectious agent, which is why immune system boosters such as toll-like receptor agonists, which mimic bacterial DNA, help. They also used anti-CD25 antibodies to tie up immune system T regulatory cells, which often serve as brakes that can reduce responses to the vaccine.
The researchers studied both normal mice and transgenic mice carrying an activated HER2/neu oncogene, which has been linked to breast cancer in humans. In order to get a protective immune response, the transgenic mice were repeatedly given vaccine in combination with the toll-like receptor agonist or were given antibodies that blocked their protective T regulatory cells. Celis and his colleagues found that the peptide vaccine administered this way could prevent or slow the growth of injected tumor cells, and showed some benefit against early stage spontaneous breast tumors.