Penn scientist's vaccine shows promise against early form of breast cancer

One year ago, Shelley Dodt received a thrilling e-mail from her University of Pennsylvania breast surgeon:

Shelley,

Your pathology is completely benign. No evidence of residual DCIS. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.

Brian

Dodt, now 56, of Palm City, Fla., had received Brian J. Czerniecki's experimental vaccine to treat her early-stage breast cancer, called DCIS, before having surgery to remove the cancer. The pathologist who examined the excised tissue under a microscope could not find any malignant cells. Revved by the vaccine, her immune system had wiped out the cancer.

Few other patients have responded so completely to the vaccine, and no one can yet say whether the protective effect will decline over time. Still, in a field littered with failures, Czerniecki's team has found a way to make the concept - a therapeutic cancer vaccine - work well.

Any patient would have been grateful; Dodt was also inspired by her unpretentious, teddy-bearish doctor and his team.

The former marketing executive soon joined forces with another patient-turned-devotee, the Olympic figure-skating coach Uschi Keszler of Aston. To date, their Delaware County nonprofit, Pennies in Action, has raised more than $200,000 for the ongoing vaccine trials - a much-needed supplement to federal funding.

The women have an infectious - and sometimes hyperbolic - enthusiasm.

"Uschi and I just live for the day that the last mammography machine is pushed over the cliff," Dodt said Monday, back at Penn for one of the semiannual checkups she will have for five years.

Tough to detect

After the offending flesh was removed in August 2009, a routine pathology exam revealed malignant cells lining her milk ducts. Left alone, some DCIS - ductal carcinoma in situ - will progress and break through the duct walls, invading surrounding breast tissue. To be safe, DCIS is treated like invasive cancer - with a lumpectomy or mastectomy followed by radiation.

Years ago, DCIS was almost never caught, because it can't be felt as a lump. The advent of mammography in the 1970s enabled detection of the tiny calcifications that are often a sign of DCIS.

Now it is diagnosed in 60,000 women a year, and counting. That's 20 percent of all newly found breast cancers.