New Vaccine May Prevent Cancer

U.S. Army Col. George Peoples, chief of surgical oncology at the San Antonio Military Medical Center, says he has come up with a vaccine he thinks will prevent cancer. The NeuVax vaccine has begun Phase III clinical trials that will involve at least 700 breast cancer patients who will each receive one intradermal injection of NeuVax every month for six months. Once the first six months is up, the participants will then receive a booster inoculation every six months afterward. The goal: disease-free survival for participants at three years.

Peoples is the director for a cancer vaccine development program that he has been working on since the ’90s. When he is not trying to find a cure for cancer, he is dispatched throughout the world to provide his surgical expertise for the military. “People who are in my field approach this by saying, yes, there are ways to treat cancer, but why wait and treat, why not try to prevent?” explains Peoples.

NeuVax, which utilizes the E75 peptide, is the result of nearly 20 years of research by Peoples and others. It parallels the development of the breast cancer drug Herceptin, which targets a protein called HER2/neu that is commonly overexpressed in breast cancer patients. However, only 20 percent of breast cancer patients have a sufficient amount of HER2/neu in order for Herceptin to work. NeuVax is meant to aid those with breast cancer who have lower levels of HER2/neu expression — about 60 percent of breast cancer patients. The majority of other cancers express some levels of HER2/neu as well, which means NeuVax could prevent not just breast cancer, but a whole range of various other cancers.