Peptide vaccine stimulates immune responses in patients previously treated for breast cancer

The results of a new study on patients with breast cancer show that the HER2-based peptide vaccine AE37 had immunologic responses compared with a control substance. The results were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2012 in Chicago. “The theory is that once you form that response to the specific peptide, if the body has a recurrence, it will recognize that cancer as a bad thing, a foreign thing,” Diane F. Hale, who worked on the study, said. “The immune markers could lead us to potentially identify those people who may have a recurrence.” Researchers assigned 109 patients to AE37 and the immunoadjuvant granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and assigned 108 patients to GM-CSF alone. In the vaccine group, 86 percent of patients showed a significant immune response compared with 27 percent of patients in the control group.