Cleveland Clinic researcher surprised by (and grateful for) NIH grant to develop breast cancer vaccine

Vincent K. Tuohy

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Vince Tuohy was surprised — and grateful — when the National Institutes of Health agreed to back development of his breast cancer vaccine after his first request.

The Cleveland Clinic immunologist who studies autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis says study groups at the NIH usually make researchers submit grant proposals again and again before agreeing to fund them.

This time, Tuohy and his collaborators took home the prize on their first try.

“We never even tried to get funded for this,” Tuohy said about his lab’s novel approach to developing a breast cancer vaccine. “Nowadays, it usually takes us two or three submissions to get funded” by the NIH, he said. “This time, we were pretty surprised, pretty happy that they decided to fund us.”

Tuohy’s lab is getting $1.3 million to continue to develop a vaccine that has succeeded since 2002 to keep female mice from getting breast cancer. The first two years of the grant will come from $10.4 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money that the national institutes received earlier this year.

Tuohy, who also teaches at Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, has been told by the Clinic that his grant is the first economic stimulus money to be received by the institution. The second two years of the grant will come from the National Cancer Institute, Tuohy said. “So that will help us a lot with the mouse work,” he said.

There are several clinical trials underway for a breast cancer vaccine. The University of Arkansas is working on a therapeutic vaccine that essentially tricks the body into producing cancer-fighting antigens, while Generex Biotechnology has had successful early-phase trials with breast cancer patients on its therapeutic vaccine.

But few if any researchers appear to be going after a prophylactic vaccine — one that prevents cancer — like Tuohy’s.

Tuohy and his colleagues are developing their vaccine by aiming at a protein that occurs in small numbers in the breasts of mice — and of women. “So when the animals are vaccinated against this, there’s no damage or destruction to the breast, everything is fine, the animal is very happy, but they are protected from breast cancer,” Tuohy said.

But there’s a catch. When a mouse mother is feeding her babies with milk, the targeted protein in her breasts increases. That damages breast tissue, which means ”their offspring don’t get enough milk and don’t thrive,” Tuohy said. “But as long as they don’t lactate, they’re fine.”

Tuohy said it would take years to move the vaccine from mice to humans. “Well, we just did the animal work … and we’re testing the ability of women to respond to this protein and see whether or not we can go full-blast into human vaccination.”

Once developed for humans, the vaccine could help women at all stages of life, but especially women after their child-bearing years who are prone to breast cancer, he said.

Tuohy said he and his colleagues started their research thinking they could figure out a way to treat breast cancer. Instead, they came up with a way to treat and prevent it.

“That just fell in our laps,” he said. “I wish I could say that I was smart enough to predict that we could use this … as a preventive vaccine. That was a big surprise to us.”

Tuohy envisions an adult vaccination program like the one we had as kids. Then, we were immunized against diseases like polio and measles.

“When you are an adult, you could be vaccinated against adult diseases like breast cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, and so forth. Maybe even Alzheimer’s,” he said.

[Photo by: James Gathany/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]