Biography

My laboratory is focused on the development of cancer vaccines that are effective against metastatic breast cancer at older age. Elderly women have much higher breast cancer incidence and mortality rate than young women, and 40% of the women diagnosed with breast cancer will progress to metastatic disease. However, metastases cannot be removed by surgery or radiation, and are usually chemoresistant. In addition, elderly are more subjected to frailty and react differently to cancer therapies than young adults. Cancer vaccines are less aggressive than chemotherapy or radiation, and could therefore be especially useful for the elderly patients. However, it has been shown that older individuals do not respond to vaccine therapy as well as younger adults. This has been attributed to T cell unresponsiveness, a phenomenon also observed in cancer patients per se. We found evidence that vaccination with Mage-b DNA is effective against breast cancer metastases not only at young age, but also at old age. However, the effect was less robust at old than at young age. Therefore, an important goal in my laboratory is to tailor cancer vaccination to old age. To achieve this goal we have the following subjects under investigation:

1. Studying the adaptive and innate immune response to DNA vaccination in preclinical models with metastatic breast cancer at young and old age
2. Improvement of DNA delivery systems
3. Addition of new antigens to the vaccine vector
4. Addition of DNA sequences to the vaccine vector that improves T cell activation

Claudia Gravekamp's Abstract