Potential Use of Vaccines in the Primary Prevention of Breast Cancer in High-Risk Patients

Abstract

Cancer vaccines are an emerging therapeutic and prophylactic modality that may play a more important role in cancer prevention and treatment in the future. Therapeutic cancer vaccines are designed to generate a targeted, immune-mediated antitumor response. Successful prophylactic vaccines are those against oncogenic viral infections, such as the human papillomavirus and cervical cancer. However, a tough challenge for the majority of tumor vaccines is the self-nature of tumor antigens. Ongoing studies are investigating methods to enhance vaccine strategies including immune-modulating agents. The present review analyzes the potential use of vaccines in the primary prevention of breast cancer, focusing on the recent extension of vaccine target selection to self-proteins that are overexpressed during the early stages of tumor development but whose expression no longer occurs as we age, a feature that may avoid clinically significant autoimmune sequelae.

Presence of human papillomavirus DNA in breast cancer: a Spanish case-control study

“…The presence of HPV might also provide a new target allowing individualized patient treatment. The possibility of including antiviral agents as part of the strategy for the prevention (vaccines) [ 18 , 75 ] and treatment of breast cancer could be a reality in the future, as it is currently done in other cancers, such as hepatocellular carcinoma or Kaposi’s sarcoma.…”

Evaluation of human cytomegalovirus antigen expression in invasive breast carcinoma in a population of Iranian patients

“…Sample size, primer designing in PCR based studies, and site of tissue sampling may justify another part of the controversial findings of these studies [ 25 ].…”

Prophylactic Autologous Cancer Cells Immunization Inhibits Triple Negative Breast Tumors’ Growth and Metastasis in 4T1 Tumor-Bearing BALB/c Mice

“…However, mice immunized with IFA alone failed to inhibit breast tumors growth. These results are expected because the adjuvants usually increase the humoral and cellular immune response and when administered with antigens, help the immune system to boost immunogenicity, accelerate the immune responses, and improve efficient immune responses [17,18] . Most of cancer vaccine trials have been done in people who have been diagnosed with cancer and usually are immunosuppressed patients.…”

“…Most of cancer vaccine trials have been done in people who have been diagnosed with cancer and usually are immunosuppressed patients. Therefore preventive breast cancer vaccines seem to be effective in women who are highrisk patients [18] . Recently prevention experimental studies have performed which used highly expressed cancer antigens [19][20][21] .…”