Treating Advanced Breast Cancer with Dendritic Cells: Results from Our Study
Advanced breast cancer diagnosis is incredibly difficult, and as doctors, our primary goal is to find safe, effective, and innovative ways to help our patients fight back. Traditional treatments like chemotherapy and radiation are well-known, but today, we want to talk to you about the power of your own body.
Through our joint research and clinical work at the Practice Group for Cell Therapy Duderstadt and the University Hospital Göttingen, we have been using a promising form of immunotherapy, dendritic cell therapy.
We want to share the results of our recent study with you, explaining what this therapy is, how it works, and the hope it brings to patients with advanced breast cancer.
What are Dendritic Cells?
Think of your immune system as a highly trained army. In this army, the dendritic cells are the generals or detectives. Their job isn't necessarily to fight the cancer directly, but to find the cancer cells, gather information about what they look like, and show this information to the cancer-killing T-cells so they can attack.
Often, breast cancer cells are tricky because they hide from the immune system. Dendritic cell therapy is designed to unmask the cancer and train your immune system to find and destroy it.
Our Study Design
To prove how effective this treatment can be, we conducted a pilot study involving 62 patients diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.
Our goal was to see if we could trigger the immune system to respond to the tumor, stabilizing the disease or even shrinking it (remission). We carefully monitored the patients and divided the outcomes into two groups: those whose bodies responded to the therapy, and those whose bodies unfortunately did not.
What the Data Showed
For the patients who responded positively (there were 24 patients out of 62) to the dendritic cell therapy, the results were highly encouraging. The median survival time was 28 months, with some patients living up to 43 months during the study window. 58% of these patients survived beyond 2 years, a highly significant milestone for advanced-stage breast cancer.
Among patients whose immune systems did not respond to the therapy (31 of 62), the median survival time was 5 months, and the 2-year survival rate was 3%. Note: A small number of the total 62 patients were not evaluable in these two main brackets.
Here, we can also see from this study that the total response rate was 43,6 %.
What this Means for Patients
These numbers tell a very clear story: When the body responds to dendritic cell therapy, it can be incredibly successful at fighting advanced breast cancer. By training your immune system, we are seeing that it is possible to stabilize the disease, stop it from progressing, and in some cases, push the cancer into remission, even in the advanced stages when other treatments may have stopped working.
Our teams at the Practice Group for Cell Therapy Duderstadt in Germany are dedicated to refining this process, understanding why some patients respond better than others, and making this life-extending therapy available to those who need it.
Further information on the study can be found here: Neßelhut, T.; Marx, D.; Matthes, C.; Lorenzen, D.; Cillien, N.; Neßelhut, J.; Peters, J.H. Dendritic cell therapy in advanced breast cancer. Int. J. Gynecol. Cancer.