Once their cancer goes into remission, about 25 percent of breast cancer patients see the disease come back within a few years.
A new treatment being tested at the Anschutz Medical Campus aims to change that.
Galena Biopharma is testing NeuVax, a breast cancer recurrence prevention therapy, at 100 hospitals across the country, including University of Colorado Hospital.
Mark Ahn, CEO of Galena, said the drug attacks the tumor-producing cells that are sometimes left over in a cancer patient’s body after the disease goes into remission. In many cases, those cells are the same cells that caused the initial illness, but they are sequestered or occult, making them hard for doctors to see.
Ahn said in many cases, the cells cause a second round of cancer, sometimes in a different part of the woman’s body.
Ahn said the treatment is important because after doctors use the best science available to successfully treat the disease, they and the patient are left waiting for a possible recurrence.
“Instead of waiting around for you to have a recurrence of that same breast cancer in the breast or in other places in the body, let’s keep her in full remission by wiping out any of these individual cells that might be occult or sequestered in the body,” he said.
NeuVax targets cancer in women, particularly breast cancer.
The treatment works by essentially training the body’s immune system to attack those occult cells, killing them before they can cause cancer again.
“Instead of just looking around for general things that are bad in the body, they are looking for one thing, that is a tumor cell,” he said in an interview last week from the company’s Oregon headquarters.
The treatment is relatively easy on the patients, too, Ahn said, with a vaccination in the thigh under the skin, followed by a booster once a month for six months and once every six months after that.
“It’s a very simple, very well tolerated vaccine,” he said.
Diane Altenburg, 64, of Springfield, Va. took the vaccine as part of a trial after a second bout with breast cancer a few years ago.
Other than some drowsiness after the initial injection, Altenburg said there were no side effects.
Altenburg said she encourages other cancer patients to participate in the trial.
“Think about how you are helping the next person. It’s a way of paying back of getting rid of the disease,” she said.
Ahn said that in a recent trial, Galena tested the drug on 187 people. Over 36 months, none of the patients using NeuVax had a recurrence. Among the patients in the placebo group that wasn’t treated with NeuVax, 23 percent had a recurrence, he said.
In the current trial, which is in its enrollment phase, Galena is testing the drug on 700 patients at 36 hospitals in the United States and 100 worldwide.
Ahn said that if everything goes well, Galena could apply to the FDA for final approval within 12 to 18 months.
Dr. Virginia F. Borges, director of the Young Women’s Breast Cancer Translational Program at University of Colorado is leading the trial at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.
Borges said that while she is focused on young cancer patients, the trial is open to a broad range of patients. Doctors hope to enroll as many women as possible in the trial, she said.
Reach reporter Brandon Johansson at 720-449-9040 or bjohansson@aurorasentinel.com