When you start listing the accomplishments of the U.S. Army, curing cancer isn’t likely to come up.
But Army researchers at the San Antonio Military Medical Center in Texas have developed a vaccine that doctors say has slashed recurrence rates of breast cancer and could be used to prevent cancers of the colon, prostate and lung.
The drug is called E-75 and it works by training the body’s immune system to recognize a protein present on the surface of many cancer cells, and then destroy those cells. The Army doctor who headed the research, Col. George Peoples, said one of his team’s biggest innovations was updating their method for testing the vaccine.
“The problem is most cancer vaccines have been tested on late-stage or end-stage cancer patients,” Peoples told The Daily. “That kind of intuitively doesn’t make sense. You don’t get your flu shot when you’ve already got the flu.”
Peoples said testing the drug on healthy women at risk for breast cancer could take decades to show results, so his team did the next-best thing. They tested healthy survivors who have beaten breast cancer but still run a risk of the disease recurring.
For women in a control group given no treatment, the rate of cancer recurrence was 20 percent, Peoples said. Among patients given the new drug, he said, “we cut that rate in half.”
That success rate matches that of a widely prescribed cancer drug called Herceptin, Peoples said, but while Herceptin only works for about 20 percent of patients, E-75 worked for 60 percent.
“It’s a big deal,” Peoples said. “However, nothing’s a done deal until it’s proven in phase three” — large-scale clinical trials.
The Army has partnered with a company called Galena Biopharma on the third phase of clinical testing, which begins early this year.
Erik.German@thedaily.com
But Army researchers at the San Antonio Military Medical Center in Texas have developed a vaccine that doctors say has slashed recurrence rates of breast cancer and could be used to prevent cancers of the colon, prostate and lung.
The drug is called E-75 and it works by training the body’s immune system to recognize a protein present on the surface of many cancer cells, and then destroy those cells. The Army doctor who headed the research, Col. George Peoples, said one of his team’s biggest innovations was updating their method for testing the vaccine.
“The problem is most cancer vaccines have been tested on late-stage or end-stage cancer patients,” Peoples told The Daily. “That kind of intuitively doesn’t make sense. You don’t get your flu shot when you’ve already got the flu.”
Peoples said testing the drug on healthy women at risk for breast cancer could take decades to show results, so his team did the next-best thing. They tested healthy survivors who have beaten breast cancer but still run a risk of the disease recurring.
For women in a control group given no treatment, the rate of cancer recurrence was 20 percent, Peoples said. Among patients given the new drug, he said, “we cut that rate in half.”
That success rate matches that of a widely prescribed cancer drug called Herceptin, Peoples said, but while Herceptin only works for about 20 percent of patients, E-75 worked for 60 percent.
“It’s a big deal,” Peoples said. “However, nothing’s a done deal until it’s proven in phase three” — large-scale clinical trials.
The Army has partnered with a company called Galena Biopharma on the third phase of clinical testing, which begins early this year.
Erik.German@thedaily.com
