vaccine results may not be as straight-forward as thought--a bit disconcerting!

[Lani]

They gave the vaccine after diagnosing the DCIS by core biopsy but prior to doing the definitive surgery. Thereafter they did the definitive surgery and looked at the DCIS specimen and tested it for ER, PR and her2/

Underinfluence of the her2 vaccine, the patients immune systems fought back against the her2+ cells, but in some patients the residual tumor was made up of other types of cells this was not so bad for those with Er+her2+ breast cancer as they were left with ER+her2- breast cancer for which there was still antiestrogen treatment avaiable. For those with her2+er- disease, what was left was her2-er- for which there were few good drugs (they are trying cisplatin, antiEGFR drugs, PARP inhibitors etc but Triple Negative disease remains difficult to treat.

Again this was DCIS, not IDC and may behave differently and these were pulsed dendritic vaccines and not peptide vaccines.

It is just to make one wonder that some vaccines may not be as "harmless" as thought. Even if they work well, they may have the effect of some weedkillers.



If they don't kill all weeds, what weed aren't affected and aren't left won't have the other weeds to compete with and may end up taking over.

Simiilarly even though this vaccine was more effective in completely clearing away the DCIS for those with her2+er- DCIS, those whose DCIS did not disappear completely were left with triple negative DCIS. If the same thing would hold true for invasive breast cancer as for DCIS, that could be a significant problem.

Again don't compare apples with oranges, ie DCIS with IDC, pulsed dendritic vaccines with peptide vaccines.

Again, we know there is more her2+dcis than her2+idc, so not all will progress. I am not sure how much we know about triple negative DCIS.

Hope this helped.