UNAM’s New Breast Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise

Mexico City, January 1 (SinEmbargo). The Faculty of Chemistry and the Institute of Biomedical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) are developing a vaccine to cure breast cancer and inhibit other variants of that disease.

Allan Noé Domínguez Romero, an academic from the Faculty of Chemistry, explained that it has been proven that the biologicals, called Variable Epitope Libraries (BEVs), have an “immunological memory” that prevents the disease from recurring, even if cancer cells are implanted a second time.

In this sense, the vaccines have also proven effective in eliminating the metastasis of cancer cells, which represents the main cause of death, for which the activation of the immune system is required.

The specialist in charge of this project indicated that, after more than a decade of work, the development of this vaccine was achieved, with the results recently published in the international journal Molecular Immunology. However, early detection and treatment improve the effectiveness of the treatment.

For her part, Karen Manucharyan, a researcher at UNAM’s Institute of Biomedical Research, emphasized that another advantage of the vaccine is that it could work for any of the 220 types of cancer that exist, in addition to its cost being considerably lower than the treatments currently applied, which reach 200 billion dollars per year worldwide.

Manucharyan explained that, because cancer cells are “moving targets,” their genome and phenotype change permanently, so they cannot be combated using vaccines that do not show that same dynamism.

In this sense, the authors of the research developed a vaccine with thousands of mutated versions of a wild-type antigen related to cancer, which allows them to attack cancer cells, activate the immune system, and induce “immunological memory.”

Given the above, Domínguez Romero recalled that breast cancer is classified as the main cause of death among Mexican women, with a projected rate of 9.9 per 100,000.