A bold strategy

Attempting to eradicate cancer through protective vaccination

Cancer disrupts lives, killing more than 7 million people worldwide each year. It is the second leading cause of death in the U.S. with half a million deaths each year. Treatment costs have also soared, now accounting for about 10 percent of the total U.S. healthcare costs.

Bold, new strategies are needed, and this project epitomizes that thinking. We’re attempting to eradicate cancer through protective vaccination.  The goal is to develop a vaccine that would be administered to healthy people to prime their immune systems for the recognition and destruction of a tumor and other malfunctioning cells.  It could also serve as a therapeutic treatment for early stage cancers. 

Clearly, the most successful medical intervention in history was the introduction of vaccines.  To date, such an approach for cancer was limited by the unique nature of each individual’s cancer.  But, we believe we may have found a link between proteins produced by various cancers that will make a cancer vaccine possible.

It’s been well-established that cancers create foreign proteins that the immune system can recognize.  The first cancer target we are exploring is breast cancer. The idea is to demonstrate that, if we could pre-immunize an individual with a collection of proteins that effectively represent any foreign protein that a breast tumor would produce, the immune system would arm itself against breast cancer.  If the platform technology proves successful, it could be applied to other cancers.

The Biodesign Institute and the Mayo Clinic Arizona are collaborating on the exploration of this research frontier. This epic endeavor brings the informatics, genomics, proteomics and immunology fields together to eradicate cancer.

Project funded with support from:

Innovator Award, U.S. Department of Defense, Breast Cancer Research Program

W.M. Keck Foundation