ROANOKE, Va. – It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Every two minutes someone in the U.S. is diagnosed.
Many people don’t know that trials are going on right now for a breast cancer vaccine.
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Former NBC correspondent and breast cancer survivor, Kristen Dahlgren, said she quit her job at the network to start a nonprofit focused on getting a vaccine out quicker. The Cancer Vaccine Coalition is made up of doctors and vaccine researchers who are sharing their research to make it happen faster.
10 News talked with Dahlgren this week when she was in town for a Virginia Breast Cancer Foundation fundraiser. You can see how passionate she is about this urgent, life-saving project.
“It’s happening. The science is there. So it could be 25 to 30 years under the current system, but I get letters every day from women and men who need this vaccine now. If we can accelerate the process, even by, you know, 10 years, if we can get it to market in five to 10 years or less, that’s saving almost a million lives here in the U.S. alone. This means saving lives. It means eventually that maybe people won’t have to go through toxic chemotherapy and radiation.”
She was diagnosed five years ago and said she still has ongoing issues from breast cancer like trouble lifting her arm and having no feeling in her chest.
“There are a lot of things that people don’t realize. Breast cancer stays with you long beyond active treatment. It’s something I worry about every day. Every time I get a headache, I think, ‘Is this my cancer coming back?’ It’s a terrible way to live.”
Dahlgren said the vaccine would be given to survivors first so they don’t get breast cancer again. Vaccines to fight all kinds of cancer could be on the horizon.
“It’s not just breast cancer vaccines. I know we’re focused on breast cancer this month, but we’re seeing advances in pancreatic cancer vaccines and glioblastoma vaccines and melanoma vaccines. The UK is giving out 10,000 cancer vaccines as part of a national effort. I think we can do the same thing here, and that’s one of the things that I want to do, is to recreate that. If we can move things quicker and get thousands of people into these trials, they move so much faster. So I’m working with the government. I’m trying to work with the industry. We have a group of the top breast cancer oncologists and researchers in the country working on this together.”
She said it’s going to take everyone’s help to make this a reality, along with the funding to research and go to trials.
“This is not just a coalition of doctors. This is a coalition of anyone who has had someone they love get cancer, who’s had cancer themselves. If we all step up and we join this effort, we can insist that there are better days ahead, and we deserve them and move the science forward faster.”
To learn more about the Cancer Vaccine Coalition, visit the website.
See our extended interview with Kristen Dahlgren below: