Experts at the 2024 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium^® will explore emerging possibilities in breast cancer prevention and discuss the progress and challenges related to developing cancer vaccines.

“Vaccines for cancer prevention are a very new thing, and there are still only a few cancer immunologists/immunotherapists developing this approach for prevention of cancers that are caused by viruses,” said Olivera (Olja) J. Finn, PhD, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “Because of the history of failures of therapeutic cancer vaccines, there is a lot of skepticism about cancer vaccines in general.”

Dr. Finn will be a panelist in the Risk Reduction and Early Detection track session, New Directions in Breast Cancer Prevention, on Friday, December 13, from 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. CT in Stars at Night Ballrooms 3-4 in the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. She will explain what makes cancer vaccines highly feasible as a prevention approach and why they have a much higher immunogenicity when administered in the absence of cancer to people with increased cancer risk.

Dr. Finn also will introduce a vaccine she has been instrumental in developing that is based on a shared tumor antigen MUC1 that is abnormally expressed in many cancers, including breast cancer, and share data from recently completed trials of that vaccine for colon and lung cancer prevention. A breast cancer prevention trial for the vaccine opened in February 2024.

“Our goal is to illuminate the evolution of breast cancer prevention trials and to motivate early-career investigators in particular to see that it is possible to accelerate progress and make a difference for breast cancer prevention,” said session moderator Gretchen L. Gierach, PhD, MPH, Director of the Integrative Tumor Epidemiology Branch for the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Finn believes that preventative cancer vaccines have the same potential for impact on global health as vaccines for infectious diseases have had.

“Cancer incidence and cancer deaths are high and expected to continue to rise in every part of the world. Vaccines can lower cancer risk for future generations,” Dr. Finn said. “They can lower the emotional and financial burden of cancer diagnosis and treatment and save millions of lives in the future.”

Additional panelists in the session include Seema Khan, MD, and Geoff Lindeman, PhD.

Dr. Khan, the Bluhm Family Professor of Cancer Research at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University, will highlight how biomarkers factor into cancer prevention efforts.

Dr. Lindeman is the Joint Head of the Australian Cancer Research Foundation’s Cancer Biology and Stem Cells Division and Breast Cancer Laboratory at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. He will review a new target for breast cancer prevention from a bench-to-clinical trial perspective.