Grant: Project Grant

This project will establish the most effective way to use a cancer vaccine to treat a very aggressive type of breast cancer, called triple negative breast cancer. For some patients with this disease who are diagnosed very early and who respond to traditional therapy such as chemotherapy, their disease may be cured. Unfortunately, the majority of patients with this type of breast cancer progress very quickly and do not respond to chemotherapy. For these poor outcome patients, there are very limited treatment options. We will create a cancer cell vaccine prepared from the patient's own breast cancer cells taken out at the time of their surgery. These cancer cells will be infected with a cancer killing virus, called an oncolytic virus to make them better targets for the body's own immune system. We will measure the body's immune response to this vaccine, using breast cancer cells and mouse models of surgery and breast cancer. Importantly, we will measure the effectiveness of this cancer vaccine to prevent aggressive breast cancer from coming back after surgery. The results of these studies will provide the critical information needed to design a clinical trial to test personalized breast cancer vaccines in poor outcome triple negative breast cancer patients.