Claudia Gravekamp, Ph.D.
Development of cancer vaccines

Email: gravekc@cpmcri.org

Introduction  |  Support  |  Publications

Introduction

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


Collaboration with Clinical Oncology of CPMC has been initiated for future clinical trials.


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Support

National Institutes of Health (NIH)/ National Institute on Aging (NIA).
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Publications

Click here for List of publications by Claudia Gravekamp, Ph.D. in PubMed.

Recent publications include:

1: Gravekamp C, Leal B, Denny A, Bahar R, Lampkin S, Castro F, Kim SH, Moore D,Reddick R. In vivo responses to vaccination with Mage-b, GM-CSF and thioglycollate in a highly metastatic mouse breast tumor model, 4T1.
Cancer Immunol Immunother. 2007 Dec 20.

2: Yang B, O'Herrin SM, Wu J, Reagan-Shaw S, Ma Y, Bhat KM, Gravekamp C, Setaluri V, Peters N, Hoffmann FM, Peng H, Ivanov AV, Simpson AJ, Longley BJ. MAGE-A, mMage-b, and MAGE-C proteins form complexes with KAP1 and suppress p53-dependent apoptosis in MAGE-positive cell lines.
Cancer Res. 2007 Oct 15;67(20):9954-62.

3: Gravekamp C. Cancer vaccines in old age.
Exp Gerontol. 2007 May;42(5):441-50. Epub 2007 Jan 2. Review.

4: Sypniewska RK, Hoflack L, Tarango M, Gauntt S, Leal BZ, Reddick RL, Gravekamp C. Prevention of metastases with a Mage-b DNA vaccine in a mouse breast tumor model: potential for breast cancer therapy.
Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2005 May;91(1):19-28.

5: Gravekamp C, Sypniewska R, Gauntt S, Tarango M, Price P, Reddick R. Behavior of metastatic and nonmetastatic breast tumors in old mice.
Exp Biol Med (Maywood). 2004 Jul;229(7):665-75.

6: Gravekamp C, Sypniewska R, Hoflack L. The usefulness of mouse breast tumor models for testing and optimization of breast cancer vaccines at old age.
Mech Ageing Dev. 2004 Feb;125(2):125-7. Review.

7: Brown PD, Carrington DG, Gravekamp C, van de Kemp H, Edwards CN, Jones SR, Prussia PR, Garriques S, Terpstra WJ, Levett PN. Direct detection of leptospiral material in human postmortem samples.
Res Microbiol. 2003 Oct;154(8):581-6.


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