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"Let me tell you what really convinced me that the immune system has a lot to do with cancer," relates Neil Riordan, M.S., P.A.-C., Founder and Director of Aidan, Inc. "There was a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1993 by Dr. James McCoy. It was a study of women with breast cancer. They had 77 women enrolled who were about to undergo surgery. When the surgery was performed they took tumor tissue and co-cultured this tissue with the patient's own lymphocytes (white blood cells). In some of the women, the lymphocytes had no reaction to the tumor tissue, and in other women the lymphocytes were stimulated and proliferated. This was nothing but the women's own natural immune response. Then they followed these women for more than 16 years. At that time, 47% of those women who showed no immune response had died. But of those women who had had an immune reaction, 95% were still alive."
People develop cancer, says Riordan, because of "immune tolerance;" that is, their immune systems are tolerating these tumors or cancers to grow. "The whole idea is to break immune tolerance," Riordan says. "If you have a tumor, then your body's letting it be. Otherwise, it would have rid itself of the tumor a long time ago, before you could even feel it. And that immune tolerance is what we're all about. That's what we try to get rid of."
Riordan finds that by rescuing and rehabbing the immune system cells with unique, advanced methods, the patient's immune tolerance transmutes into immune competence. This means that the patient's immune system recognizes, attacks and destroys tumors and cancer cells, without needing any chemotherapy or radiation, or just minimal doses, thus avoiding their destructive side effects.
Breast Cancer Cases from the Clinic
An 80 year old breast cancer patient from New York. She was diagnosed five years ago and underwent several chemotherapy treatments. Her doctors told her she was to begin radiation treatments as soon as she "got her health back." She did not wait and traveled to the clinic. Now, she is "too busy with my life to find time to play golf, which I love!"
A 50 year old breast cancer patient from Huntsville, Alabama. She was first diagnosed in 1981 and was told of the clinic by a friend who was being treated for brain cancer. She stopped taking the treatments in 1991. In 1994, she was diagnosed with liver cancer and offered the same conventional treatment as was offered by her doctors in 1981. She went back to the clinic and resumed taking the sera. Today, she is active and leading a "normal" life.
Research Study #1
Authors and Citation: Emens LA, Jaffee EM. Toward a breast cancer vaccine: work in progress. Oncology (Huntingt). 2003 Sep;17(9):1200-11; discussion 1214, 1217-8.
Contact Information: Sidney Kimmel, Comprehensive Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. emensle@jhmi.edu
This article suggests that cancer vaccines may have advantages over traditional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation in treating breast cancer. Those advantages being vaccines can be more tumor-specific, have minimal toxicity, and the way the vaccine works is different than chemo or radiation; so immune therapy can still work when tumor cells become resistant to drugs or radiation.
Advances in biotechnology and basic immunology have converged to create an unprecedented opportunity to use vaccines to harness the power of the immune system in the fight against breast cancer. Cancer vaccines have several therapeutic advantages over more traditional breast cancer treatment modalities. First, targeting the antitumor immune response to critical tumor-specific antigens defines a therapy with exquisite specificity and minimal toxicity. Second, immune-mediated tumor destruction occurs by mechanisms distinct from those underlying the efficacy of chemotherapy and hormone therapy. Thus, immunotherapy offers an approach to circumventing the intrinsic drug resistance that currently underlies therapeutic failure. Third, the phenomenon of immunologic memory endows immunotherapy with the potential for creating a durable therapeutic effect that is reactivated at the onset of disease relapse. Moreover, immunologic memory also underlies the potential future use of vaccines for the prevention of breast cancer. Early clinical trials have highlighted the promise of breast cancer vaccines, and have further defined the challenges facing translational scientists and clinical investigators. The judicious application of laboratory advances to clinical trial design should facilitate the development of immunotherapy as an additional major therapeutic modality for breast cancer, with the potential for breast cancer prevention as well as treatment.
Research Study #2
Authors and Citation: Hernando JJ, Park TW, Kuhn WC Dendritic cell-based vaccines in breast and gynaecologic cancer. Anticancer Res. 2003 Sep-Oct;23(5b):4293-303.
Contact Information: Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Bonn, Sigmund-Freud-Str. 25, 53105 Bonn, Germany. j.hernando@uni-bonn.de
This article is an overview of dendritic cell vaccines for a variety of tumor types, focusing on breast cancer. The article summarizes the ins and outs of dendritic cell therapy for breast and gynecological cancers.
Major advances in understanding the functional interactions between tumour cells and the host immune system, in particular the generation and regulation of T cell immunity, have revived interest in cancer vaccination strategies. A crucial step for mounting an anti-tumour response is the capture, processing and presentation of tumour antigens (TA) to cognate T cells by professional antigen-presenting cells (APC), followed by their activation and clonal proliferation. Dendritic cells (DC) are potent APC with the unique ability to stimulate primary immune responses. Animal models have demonstrated that TA-charged DC can activate specific cytotoxic T cells (CTL) and even regression of established tumours in cancer-bearing hosts. These findings, as well as the elaboration of methods for generating large numbers of DC ex vivo, have provided a compelling rationale for using DC as potent adjuvants to deliver TA to the immune system in order to trigger or amplify an inadequate response. The capacity of TA-pulsed DC to induce significant CTL immunity translating into occasional therapeutic benefit has been documented in several clinical settings including B cell lymphoma, myeloma, melanoma, prostate, colon, ovarian and renal cell carcinoma. In this review, we summarize key biological functions of DC and focus on recent DC-based vaccination trials of breast, ovarian and cervical cancer.
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