A breast cancer vaccine administered to a 53-year-old jewelry designer in 2006 has left the Scottsdale, Ariz. woman cancer free, Newsweek Magazine reports.
In May 2006, Shari Baker traveled to the University of Washington, where she received a vaccine injection in her upper arm. Baker got five more shots over the next five months, and and today, scans detect no cancer anywhere in her body.
The other 21 women who received the experimental vaccine against metastatic breast cancer are also doing well — so well that its inventor, immunologist Mary (“Nora”) Disis of UW, says that it’s possible to have a future in which vaccines “control or even eliminate cancer,” Newsweek reports.
According to Newsweek, scientists say that the vaccine contained fragments of a molecule called her2/neu, which fuels the growth and proliferation of some breast cancers. Baker’s immune system responded to the molecule by attack it. Cells called CD4 then roused white blood cells called T cells, which destroyed the tumor cells in Baker’s breast as well as her spine.
Additionally, when T cells destroy the cancer cells, it stimulates the immune system to target tumor antigens a second time around — allowing T cells to destroy tumor cells years after vaccination.
“After many years of failure [with cancer vaccines], we’re finally getting it right,” Larry Kwak of M.D. Anderson said, according to Newsweek.
