Causes or Cures They Received an Experimental Vaccine for Advanced Breast Cancer Decades Ago. They’re Still Alive Today—Dr. Zachary Hartman on the Science
What if cancer didn’t have to be eradicated, but could be remembered, monitored, and controlled by the immune system itself?
In this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks speaks with Dr. Zachary Hartman, the lead researcher who revisited an extraordinary breast cancer vaccine trial conducted over 20 years ago. The trial involved a small group of women with advanced breast cancer. Women who, remarkably, are all still alive today.
By analyzing their blood decades later, the research team discovered that these women still carried immune cells capable of recognizing their cancer, suggesting durable immune memory lasting more than two decades. (Study link here.)
We discuss:
- The original breast cancer vaccine trial and what it was designed to do, in plain language
- What it was like to discover that the women from the trial were still alive more than 20 years later
- How the immune systems of these women continued to recognize cancer cells long after the trial
- What CD27-positive immune cells are and why they matter, explained simply
- Why helper CD4 T cells may be just as important, or more important, than killer CD8 T cells when it comes to cancer
- What happened when researchers combined a CD27-boosting antibody with a cancer vaccine in mice
- What surprised the research team most
- The challenges of translating findings from mice to human trials
- Whether cancer could someday be managed long-term by the immune system
- How generalizable this immune memory might be across different cancers
- What this research could mean for how we think about vaccines in a post-pandemic world
- The one key message the researcher hopes the public takes away
- What’s next in this line of research
Guest Bio: Dr. Zachary C. Hartman is an Associate Professor at Duke University in the Departments of Surgery, Pathology, and Integrative Immunobiology, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Applied Therapeutics and is a member of the Cellular and Molecular Biology and Genetics and Genomics programs. He earned his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and completed his PhD at Duke University, followed by postdoctoral training in tumor immunology and breast oncology at Duke and the MD Anderson Cancer Center. In 2012, Dr. Hartman returned to Duke to establish a research program focused on tumor immunology and the development of cancer immunotherapies, including therapeutic vaccines, immune agonists, checkpoint inhibitors, antibody-based therapies, and strategies to stimulate anti-tumor immune responses.
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