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Senior Citizen Health & Medicine
Breast Cancer Survivor May Develop a Vaccine for the
Disease
Dr. Yvonne Paterson's
vaccine Lovaxin B now in pre-clinical testing
 September 26, 2006 A vaccine for breast cancer
may be developed through the leadership of a breast cancer survivor.
Yvonne Paterson, Ph.D., the scientific founder of Advaxis, Inc., as well
as a Professor of Microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania, and
her team, are working on a suite of new vaccines to treat women with
different types of cancers, including breast cancer.
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Central to the team's discovery is the microbe
Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterium found in dairy products. Dr.
Paterson built upon the well-known fact that when Listeria is introduced
into the body, it has an extremely powerful, direct stimulatory effect
on the activities of immune killer T cells.
By modifying Listeria to deliver cancer antigens,
Dr. Paterson was able to direct this response to kill cancer cells.
These modified-Listeria vaccines harness the power of the immune system
to mount an attack against the Listeria and at the same time, redirect
the immune system to also attack the cancer cells.
In early studies, Dr. Paterson used the Listeria
bacterium to deliver the tumor-associated protein HER-2/Neu to immune
cells. HER-2/Neu is over expressed in 20 to 40 percent of all breast
cancers. These cells eventually enlist killer T cells to seek out and
destroy the tumor cells that over-express the HER-2/Neu molecule.
The vaccine called Lovaxin B is now in pre-clinical
testing. The company, New Jersey-based biotechnology company, Advaxis,
is planning on manufacturing sufficient quantities of the vaccine and is
seeking FDA approval for a clinical trial.
As a breast cancer survivor, Dr. Paterson says she
is committed to the development of cancer-fighting remedies both
personally and professionally. She first hit on the idea of using
Listeria as a cancer vaccine over ten years ago.
"It took a while to dissect what elements of an
immune response were best able to cause the rejection of established
tumors," she says. "But it has paid off and we are very excited to see
the technology finally being tested in cancer patients."
Last September, Paterson's work was published in
the Journal of Immunology, which demonstrated that a live Listeria
cancer vaccine is capable of eradicating existing rapidly growing breast
tissue tumors in mice.
Listeria vaccine treatment was found to be
significantly more effective than comparable DNA vaccines, even though
the DNA vaccines were given before the implementation of tumors and the
Listeria vaccines were given after tumors were palpable.
The profound immunologic response to a series of
five Listeria vaccines that were constructed to assess the efficacy of
novel fragments of the HER-2/neu antigen revealed the ability of novel
immune recognition sites used in these agents to arrest tumor
progression in all cases and achieve regression that included complete
regression in many cases.
"We found that we can stop the tumor from growing
out to 100 days, at which time we stopped measuring since this is a long
time for experiments of this type," said Dr. Paterson. The tumors
stopped growing or went completely away."
About Dr. Paterson
Dr. Paterson has been an invited speaker at
national and international health field conferences and leading academic
institutions. She has served on many federal advisory boards including
the National Institutes of Health expert panel to review primate
centers, the Office of AIDS Research Planning Fiscal Workshop and the
Allergy and Immunology NIH Study Section.
She has been Section Editor of the Journal of
Immunology and has written over 120 publications (including a recently
published book) in Immunology. Most recently she has written in the
areas of HIV Aids and Cancer research.
Her instruction and mentorship has trained over 40
post-doctoral and doctoral students in the fields of Biochemistry and
Immunology, many of whom are research leaders in academia and industry.
She is a Professor in the Department of
Microbiology, Associate Dean for Postdoctoral Research Training and
Director of Biomedical Post-doctoral Programs at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
She is also a member of the University of
Pennsylvania Cancer Center and the Center for AIDS Research.
Dr. Paterson completed her BS and MS in
Biochemistry at the University of Manchester, England. Additionally, she
received her BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from the Australian
National University and completed her Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Melbourne
University in 1979.
She continued her training as a Postdoctoral Fellow
at Cornell University from 1979-82 and then became an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Immunology at the Scripps Research
Institute. She joined the faculty of the Microbiology Department at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1988 and was promoted to full Professor in
1993.
For more on Advaxis, log on to
http://www.advaxis.com/.
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