Some good news: Encouraging Results for Breast Cancer Vaccine Tested in Mice

[brandon]

With all the bad news in recent days, it's a relief to hear some good news.

Immunologist Vincent Tuohy tested a prophylactic vaccine to protect against breast cancer in a mouse model. The results of this study were published in Nature Medicine.

First the caveats:

• This was only tested in mice, against a specific type of breast cancer.
• If it proves effective in preventing human breast cancer, it is at least ten years away from widespread use.

Due to very limited financial resources, only six mice were used in the test group and six in the control group. (The mice cost $250 each, and the researchers tested hundreds of vaccines.) The mice used are genetically-predisposed to breast cancer.  

At 10 months (which is fairly far along in a mouse's life) 100% of the vaccinated mice were cancer-free, and 100% of the unvaccinated mice had developed breast cancer.

Although the experiment was extremely small, Dr. Tuohy is satisfied that the vaccine is effective in these mice against the breast cancer that these mice develop without the vaccine.

Given the small size of the experiment, the results could be a statistical fluke, but Dr. Tuohy feels that the potential benefit is so great that it would be overly-cautious to take another ten months to repeat the study with a larger number of mice.

Proving a vaccine is safe and effective in humans is a very long process, but the good news for young women is that the vaccine would probably be administered around age 40.

Details on NPR's Science Friday (audio interview)