It’s coming, so wise up.
It’s a constantly recurring theme from medically-untrained alternative health “researchers” (who just read and steal other people’s notes in Google): that vaccines don’t work. Of course they work. It’s only the homeopathic principle, after all—a little of the substance trains the body to respond in a healthy way.
I’m always glad of the smallpox vaccine; and rabies, as I have said many times. My first mother-in-law was a nice lady who, as a child, had a brush with death via smallpox. That’s how real the disease was in our modern world.
Influenza is more or less a waste of time because the virus mutates so fast, by the time the vaccine is manufactured, it is out of date.
And some, of course, are very dangerous, like Gardasil, which should never have come to market.
But proper vaccines continue to save lives. They are, after all, an intelligent interaction with one of our main defence mechanisms, the immune system.
So why not engage the vaccination tool against cancer? It could mean the end, once and for all, of ghastly chemo, radiation therapy and mutilating surgery.
Why am I optimistic? Because we will be using Nature’s own mechanisms to stroke down the cancer. That’s got to make sense.
How could this work?
Most people, I think, understand the receptor principle. Receptors are small fragments of molecules sticking out from a cell, which lock in with specific messenger chemicals. No receptors and the messenger can’t do its job.
So what if we could wreck the necessary receptors on the surface of a cancer cell, those which fuel cell growth and proliferation? It would cripple its function. And choosing just a receptor in this way means a much smaller target to hit. In theory it should work better.
Well, it’s coming. Animal studies have demonstrated it’s entirely feasible to knock out valuable receptors on the surface of cancer cells by cultivating T-cells that react to them as a specific antigen.
With persistence Mary Disis of the University of Washington and her research team developed several targeted cancer therapies. After more than a decade of laboratory and animal testing, they have developed the first ever human anti-breast-cancer vaccine.
Over 60 women who received the experimental vaccine against metastatic breast cancer and most are doing very well.
In 2010, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the prostate cancer vaccine, called Provenge.
In 2011, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania unveiled what they call a cancer “breakthrough 20 years in the making”: a vaccine against chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) that has brought about remissions of up to a year and counting—and which its inventors believe can be tweaked to attack lung cancer, ovarian cancer, myeloma, and melanoma.
Scores of other vaccines are in the pipeline.
So if you are battling cancer and someday soon get offered the chance to try vaccination, take it. Eventually the technique will be formidable—because we are relying on Nature’s own mechanism—our own body wisdom—to solve the problem of the intruder.
That’s a future development that makes it worth working very hard, applying as much as you can of the advice in this book and make sure you survive till the vaccine becomes a clinical reality.
Vaccines might even tame pancreatic cancer. A clinical trial at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey showed great promise.
The first patient treated started injections in March 2010. By December, scans detected no tumors anywhere; three of five other patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer are also stable. 13- 19 months later the patients were doing remarkably well. None have liver or other metastases, which is surprising because pancreatic cancer likes to spread everywhere.
Brain cancer is as deadly as pancreatic cancer, but at least one experimental vaccine is showing promise against glioblastoma multiforme, the most common and aggressive form. That’s the one that killed Ted Kennedy.
A glioblastoma contains bits of the antigen epidermal growth factor receptor variant III, which studs brain cancer cells. In a clinical trial, 18 patients whose tumors had been surgically removed received the vaccine; median survival was 26 months, scientists at Duke University reported in 2010, compared with the usual 14. That’s almost double.
And in July, Larry Kwak of M.D. Anderson and colleagues reported that in patients given an experimental vaccine against follicular lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, their cancer also remained in remission almost twice as long as expected, and counting, as unvaccinated patients. Biovest International plans to seek FDA approval for the vaccine, BiovaxID, in 2012.
The End Of Chemo Resistance?
Vaccines have the potential to revolutionize cancer treatment because their effects do not stop with existing tumors. Cancer is notorious for its craftiness, changing the biological pathways by which cells proliferate so much that chemotherapies and even targeted molecular therapies soon stop working. Chemo resistance it’s called.
Vaccines could match the cancer cells move for move. In women who received Disis’s vaccine, after T cells destroy breast cancer cells they gobble them up and spit them out. That floods the body with more of the antigens, stimulating the immune system to target this second wave of tumor antigens. This spreading immunity creates locked-and-loaded T cells that can destroy tumor cells years after vaccination—the same kind of lifelong immunity that, say, a smallpox vaccine confers.
Remember, T cells never forget. Once the immune system has targeted a threat, be it cancer or smallpox, it keeps a reserve team ready to attack should that threat return. In principle, that should confer immunity against breast cancer and possibly other cancers as well—forever.
Note: don’t mix this approach up with vaccinations against viruses relevant to cancer, such as the deplorable Gardasil vaccine against papilloma virus, which is neither safe nor effective.
[SOURCE: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/11/could-this-be-the-end-of-cancer.html accessed 10/24/2012 12.00 pm PDT]