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Mayo researchers working on vaccines to treat - possibly prevent - breast cancer

Florida Times-Union - 10/30/2018

Oct. 30--A Mayo Clinic immunologist in Jacksonville envisions a not-so distant future where vaccines could help stop the relapse of cancer in patients who have already been successfully treated for breast cancer.

Keith Knutson's team of researchers is also trying to develop a preventative vaccine that would be given to healthy women to stop the disease from showing up in the first place.

"This is huge, by the way," he said. "If you had a prevention vaccine for breast cancer, this would be huge."

Multiple studies across the country suggest that immunotherapy could one day treat breast cancer patients. The Mayo research is among those aiming to come up with such treatments.

"There are no vaccines yet approved for use for any type of cancer," said Knutson. "But there will be, probably within the next decade. We hope that some of ours are among them."

Knutson is principal investigator for a Jacksonville team that's already enrolled women in clinical trials for a vaccine against what he called the "secondary prevention" of breast cancer.

Such a vaccine would be given after conventional treatment such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. The goal is to trigger the body's immune system to prevent a relapse of cancer that can develop years later, often in other parts of the body.

The team is working on several vaccines specifically designed to attack the tumor, not other tissues in the body. Not all cancers seem to react to immunotherapy, he said, but the Mayo team's trials show promising results in treating both breast and ovarian cancer.

Knutson also is part of a team developing a vaccine that could be a preventative breast cancer vaccine -- much like a flu or measles shot.

That vaccine, also being developed at Mayo's Jacksonville campus, is coming out of a think tank made up of experts from across the country. They have been working together for eight years. The National Breast Cancer Coalition helped get initial funding for that project, Knutson said.

There have been no trials yet on the preventative vaccine, which would aim at all types of breast cancer, but a vaccine has been produced. Human trials to check its safety could begin within 16 months or so, Knutson said.

It's likely such a vaccine, if successful, would be given to women after they no longer plan to have children, since it's unclear how it would interact with pregnancy, he said.

He said the importance of a preventative vaccine would be hard to overstate. "This is a big game-changer, a big blue-sky thing we've been working on," he said.

Knutson is 54, a Seattle native who's been working in the field for 20 years. He figures he'll be following the progress of the women in Mayo's clinical trials for the rest of his career.

He said he and his team, building on the work that's been done by others before, feel as they're getting closer to unlocking the power of the body's immune system to fight breast and ovarian cancer.

"I don't feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm not here just to get a whole bunch of papers. I'm here to make an impact, using just the drive, ambition and intelligence I have to make an impact on human disease," he said.

Such research is "long and laborious," he said, moving forward slowly, gradually accumulating the knowledge that leads a little closer to success.

That's seen in the lab near his office, where there's an inspirational motto posted on the wall, above a row of hanging lab coats for researchers: "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed it always to try just one more time."

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082

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