16 October 2009
In the first of its kind for the Malaghan Institute, our considerable knowledge and clinical expertise in dendritic cell-based cancer immunotherapy will now also be applied to breast cancer. This is a highly significant development because New Zealand has the third highest death rate from breast cancer in the Western world and new therapies are needed urgently if we are to turn this statistic around.
This initiative has been made possible by funding from the Breast Cancer Research Trust, Auckland, which is committed to finding a cure for breast cancer by 2018.
The goal of this latest research is to provide the necessary "proof of principle" that will lead to Phase I/II breast cancer vaccine clinical trials and the hope of an eventual cure for this devastating disease.