The Federal Drug Administration recently approved the Phase 1 clinical trial designed to study a breast cancer vaccine developed at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.
“We received notification in December that they were giving us permission to start offering the phase 1 trial of the breast cancer vaccine to women with breast cancer that had recurred after surgery and was only partially responsive to salvage chemotherapy,” said Dr. Albert Deisseroth, president and CEO of the center.
The approval was the culmination of a seven-year struggle to bring a new vaccine strategy into clinical testing, Deisseroth added.
Deisseroth’s vaccine and research has been supported by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation of New York City as well as the Breast Cancer Research Programs of the Department of Defense and the State of California.
“In the current trials, we are testing the vaccine in individuals who have cancers which have recurred,” he said. “If the outcome is encouraging, we will test the utility of the vaccine for preventing recurrence in individuals at high risk of failure after initial surgery and eventually test the vaccine to see if it can prevent the development of cancer in individuals at high risk of failure from the families with genetic predisposition to the development of breast cancer.”
The Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center is located at 10905 Road to the Cure. For information see www.skcc.org.