This is GREAT news!!! Lets pray on this one!
Breast cancer vaccine helps body fight tumors
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers who designed one experimental breast cancer vaccine say they have fine-tuned the process and come up with another that they hope will be more effective.
Their new vaccine delivers a cancer-fighting gene into cells, which then produce immune system proteins as well as tumor-destroying cells.
"In our own mind it is a very significant advance because we have put the gene into the cells in the body. The vaccine is produced by your own cells," Wei-Zen Wei of Wayne State University in Detroit, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. "It is made right in your body."
The vaccine eliminated tumors in mice from a type of cancer called HER2 positive cancer, they reported in the journal Cancer Research. HER2-positive cancers account for between 20 percent and 30 percent of breast cancers.
It even worked to eliminate HER2 tumors that had developed resistance to drugs designed to fight them, the said.
The HER2/neu protein is over-expressed, meaning it is over-active, in several tumors including breast, colorectal and ovarian cancer.
Herceptin, also known as trastuzumab, an expensive antibody-based drug made by Genentech Inc, can treat these tumors. But many patients eventually acquire what is known as resistance and the tumors start growing again.
ANTIBODIES AND KILLER T-CELLS Continued...
http://www.reuters.com/article/healt...49451620080915