NASAL NANO-VACCINE PREVENTS PRIMARY BREAST TUMOR FROM MAKING THE LUNG ITS NEW HOME

Abstract

Abstract Despite medical advances in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, metastatic breast cancers remain a leading cause of death in the U.S. Increasingly, novel immune-based treatments which harness the patient’s immune system have promise for improving survivorship. Such therapies take advantage of the immune system’s natural defense mechanisms to halt progression of breast cancer. This is through the early activation of innate immune cells such as natural killer cells and the subsequent activation of the adaptive immune responses such as T and B lymphocytes. Researchers have taken advantage of these immune mechanisms of tumor defense as a complementary approach to current radio-chemo treatments, which have shown to be limited by adverse off-target effects on patients. Ongoing research in our laboratory is focused on using nanotechnology to develop immune-based vaccines to target local immune protection against metastatic lung disease. Because the lung is naturally tolerogenic, making it easy for disseminated tumor cells to grow, the expectation is that boosting immune responses at the lungs before seeding tumors from primary organs would mitigate metastasis and reduce mortality risks. Using an experimental murine breast cancer model of metastasis, we examined the effect of intranasal vaccination to induce local and systemic adaptive immune responses. We hypothesized that an intranasal vaccine protocol would increase antigen-specific adaptive responses across the respiratory tract. Our results demonstrated that intranasal vaccination provides protection against secondary lung metastasis due to increased accumulation functional CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in the lungs as shown by flow cytometry and ELISA techniques. Supported by National Institute of Cancer Research of the Health under Award 1 P20 CA233355-01