Leisha A. Emens, M.D., Ph.D. is a medical oncologist at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Johns Hopkins University. She specializes in breast cancer care, and is developing innovative immune-based therapies for the treatment of breast cancer. Immune-based therapy is a novel cancer treatment strategy that uniquely recruits an individual’s immune system to fight cancer. This approach takes advantage of the body’s own ability to fight cancer in a highly specific way that avoids the debilitating side effects commonly associated with standard cancer treatments like chemotherapy and radiation. Successful immune-based therapies should also have a long-lasting treatment effect due to the ability of the immune response to persist and become re-activated at the first sign of tumor growth or relapse.

Dr. Emens is currently conducting a clinical study that integrates a cell-based breast cancer vaccine with low, immune-modulating doses of chemotherapy in patients with metastatic breast cancer. The study is designed to use low dose chemotherapy to strip away suppressive immune cells that help tumors to grow and spread, and replace them with vaccine-induced immune cells that are activated to seek out and destroy breast cancer cells. This should ultimately shrink existing breast tumors, and prevent others from forming. She will soon begin another clinical study that adds chemotherapy-modulated vaccination to standard Trastuzumab (Herceptin) therapy for patients with metastatic breast cancer that expresses high levels of the HER-2/neu protein. This strategy is designed to not only get rid of suppressive immune cells, but also takes advantage of the ability of Trastuzumab to further increase the numbers of activated immune cells that fight breast cancer. Dr. Emens is also investigating immune-based therapies that target not only the malignant breast cancer cells, but also the tumor-associated blood vessels that support breast cancer growth and progression. These studies are all designed to strategically integrate breast cancer vaccines with standard and novel breast cancer drugs to achieve the greatest therapeutic impact, and to reveal not only that they work, but also how they work. This research should pave the way for breast cancer vaccines to become a unique but standard part of breast cancer treatment, and ultimately breast cancer prevention.

For more in depth information on Dr. Emens research: Research Summary

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