CLASSIC SEXISM PROPELLED Dr. Nora Disis into breast cancer...

CLASSIC SEXISM PROPELLED Dr. Nora Disis into breast cancer research. “I was the only woman in my oncology fellowship class, so they had me attend the breast cancer clinic.” The old boys’ club gets a pass this time because Disis, director of the Cancer Vaccine Institute at UW Medicine and a University of Washington and Fred Hutch Cancer Center faculty member, is on the verge of the greatest accomplishment of her 30-plus-year career: a breast cancer vaccine.

Last November in the medical journal JAMA Oncology, Disis and her team published the phase 1 trial results of a DNA vaccine targeting a protein known as human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, or HER2, produced in about 30 percent of breast cancers. Sixty-six women with advanced-stage metastatic breast cancer received the shot and were monitored for a median of 10 years. By the trial’s end, 80 percent of the participants were still alive—a colossal success considering only half of patients with similar stages of breast cancer survive after five years.

Enrollment for Disis’s larger, randomized controlled phase 2 trial is ongoing. If those results prove equally successful, “I think within the next decade, we will see vaccines as part of the standard of care of cancer treatment,” she says.