Moffitt studies cell therapy to treat breast cancer

Five doctors in Tampa are pioneering a new way to treat breast cancer without chemotherapy. Moffitt Cancer Center is launching a clinical trial that could eventually replace toxic treatments with a custom vaccine. And Fox 13's Kylie Jones has more details for us. Well, chemotherapy is a life-saving tool, and it's one of the most common types of cancer treatments. But its toxic side effects take a heavy toll on the patients. Doctors say this new immunotherapy could cut out the chemo and even surgery for some of them. Over the last several years, doctors at Moffitt Cancer Center have experimented combining immunotherapy with de-escalated chemo. The treatment involved a dendritic cell vaccine, which Dr. Heather Hahn explains is custom-made using a patient's own blood. Doctors saw a lot of success with this, so now they're doing another trial, this time just using immunotherapy. The trial is targeting patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, one of the three most common types. Dr. Hahn says patients must have a tumor that's less than three centimeters and be in stage one or two. We are hoping that this treatment could potentially lead higher cure rate without patient experiencing recurrences following this treatment. We already have a preliminary data that we're working on with patients and lab that this vaccine, when we give it to patients tumor injection, to not only making tumor to get smaller and go away from the injection to that breast tumor itself, there is also data that this immunotherapy, the vaccine therapy can potentially clear metastatic, metastasis-initiating cells. Dr. Hahn says preliminary data has already shown that some patients haven't needed surgery after this immunotherapy. This trial at Moffitt is still accepting patients, and you can find more information about that on fox13news.com. Back to you.