| Cancer doctor
teams with overseas researchers to perfect breast cancer
vaccine
It's 6 a.m., but Dr. Robert
Elliott doesn't seem sleepy.
Putting aside dizzying talk of T-cells, gene therapy
and host immunities, Elliot downshifts into simple terms
for a moment to explain what motivates him to get out
of bed so early every day.
"My goal is to help people
who've got breast cancer."
More than 40,000 Americans will
die from breast cancer in 2002, says the American Cancer
Society. The disease is second only to lung cancer as
the leading cause of cancer deaths among women worldwide.
"It's a devastating disease,"
Elliott says. "I've seen too many beautiful women
die from it, and I know there's a better way to treat
it."
That better way, he believes, is
through immunology.
Elliott heads Baton Rouge's Elliott-Elliott-Head
Breast Cancer Research and Treatment Center, which he
founded in 1973. The center's focus of research has
long been to find ways to boost the body's natural immune
system to fight cancer. That's what immunotherapy is
all about,artificially stimulating the immune system
to better fight off disease or infection.
In 1993, Elliott and Dr. Jonathan
Head, the center's director of research and an expert
on cell culture, patented a vaccine that seems to help
patients' immune systems do that.
Elliott and Head are ramping up a
joint research project with researchers at two Norwegian
institutions, Norwegian Radium Hospital and the University
of Oslo, to find better ways of fighting breast cancer
with vaccines.
Starting in the mid-1970s, Elliott
observed that some of his patients were able to resist
relatively aggressive forms of the disease, while others
whose cancer was less aggressive didn't fare nearly
as well.
"It became obvious to me -
that the host for the cancer was very important,"
he says. "People who had better general immunity
seemed to do a little bit better with their cancer."
Elliott later teamed up with an immunologist
to conduct more sophisticated research into determining
host immunity by looking at antigens,foreign bodies
such as virus, bacteria, pollen or other materials that
the body fights by creating antibodies.
Elliott found that patients with
strong immunity to their own tumor antigens indeed survived
longer than those with weaker immunity.
By the late 1980s, when Dr. Head
joined the center, Elliott realized immunotherapy was
on the horizon, though medical research hadn't recognized
it yet.
The whole picture
Elliott says patients in his treatment program appear
to benefit from the vaccine therapy, enjoying longer
intervals without disease recurrence. Working with a
urologist, the center also has developed a prostate
cancer vaccine for men, he says.
Elliott admits that truly judging
the effectiveness of such vaccines is difficult, since
patients receive other forms of cancer therapy at the
same time.
"That clouds the issue,"
he says. "We're trying to look at that very carefully
because we don't want to say all these patients did
great because they had the vaccine."
Still, Elliott was invited to Oslo,
Norway, last August and asked to deliver a presentation
on his work to researchers studying how to make the
body's natural "killer cells" respond more
aggressively against cancer antigens.
"They hadn't done much whole
cell work and cell culture like we had done, so they
thought maybe we could fuse our technologies and get
a little information from both," he says.
Elliott's visit resulted in a "memorandum
of understanding" to collaborate with the Norwegians.
A copy of the document is being sent to Tommy Thompson,
head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
as a first step toward getting an endorsement,and with
luck, funding, from the federal government.
A well-funded joint project would
make it possible to stage large-scale clinical trails
with patients on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. A
proper study would take five to 10 years to complete
and cost up to $30 million, Elliott estimates.
Clinical trials on that scale would
be a long sought-after final step toward quantifying
the vaccine's effectiveness, according to Head, who's
also collaborating with a group of immunologists at
the University of Oslo.
"We've done phase one, where
we've shown that you can give the vaccine to patients
and it's not toxic," he says. "We've done
phase two, where we took the breast cancer patients
and we gave it to them and saw a response. What we're
looking at here with this other group is to get a phase
three."
Elliott says that for the most part
Norway is far ahead of the United States in exploring
the treatment of cancer through immunotherapy. Researchers
in the field carry much more clout at Norwegian medical
conferences than they would in the United States, he
adds.
"They don't look at it as some
kind of hocus-pocus stuff," Elliott says. "In
the United States, if you start talking about vaccinating
people for cancer, in most clinical circles they look
at you like you're an idiot."
Copyright © 2003 by Louisiana Business Inc. All
rights reserved by LBI.
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