Vaccines for the prevention of Breast Cancer

As it is associated with a 500.000 deaths each year, breast cancer engenders a high burden. Rather than continue to add to the mounting costs of incidence and recurrence, we believe that we should reposition ourselves and advance promising, affordable, safe strategies for the primary and secondary prevention. Vaccination has been one of the most successful approaches to reduce mortality rates of infectious diseases and more recently cancer. The best approach is to target aberrantly expressed ‘self’ antigens that contribute to the pathogenesis. While targeting of self antigens implies breaking tolerance and causing autoimmunity, this is rarely observed. The reasons for the lack of autoimmunity are not clear, but according to our hypothesis, significant vaccine-induced responses are generated against subdominant epitopes, expressed only in the local tumor microenvironment, whereas no immune response is generated against immunodominant epitopes of healthy tissues. The result is protection in the absence of autoimmune sequelae. In addition, an attractive vaccine approach involves generation of immunity to several antigens covering multiple cancer cell types (epithelial tumor cells, breast cancer stem cells and stromal cells). To produce such a safe and effective vaccine, we’re aiming to achieve key milestones, namely identifying subdominant epitopes from several cancer associated antigens and identifying vector systems that can induce durable CD4 and CD8 T cell responses.