Vaccine for Breast Cancer!

Afternoon peeps! I didn't mean to go all political on y'all yesterday, but I just get so frustrated. My darling husband reminded me nicely that many people that read my blog are Conservative. I know that.

But I just hate stupid Conservatives the way I assume that you, my dear conservative readers, hate stupid liberals. You can't possibly think all liberals are stupid, and nor do I think all Conservatives are stupid.

To clarify, when I say stupid, it really means "lazy" and refer to people who do not form their own opinions by looking at information and engaging in intelligent discussion, but instead sit around all day and send forwards to each other all day about how Obama is going to set up concentration camps for white people.

So, my point is, sorry if I offended you, but sometimes talking politics is healthy way to blow off steam. And you really can't get mad at me. I am a cancer patient ;)

So, I wanted to bring to the attention of all those who are HER2+ or interested in this drug is that there is a vaccine that is currently being tested that so far seems like it works. Although HER+ postive breast cancer patients love Herceptin, we know that 40% of people don't respond to it, and many people grow resistant to it. So while it works now, it might not work later. In Phase 1 clinical trials of this new vaccine 70% of patients had a response. Now those are statistics I like!

It works like this: Normally, our bodies doesn't respond to the HER2 protein receptors that are overexpressed on the cancer cells that we have. There are way more than normal on our cancer cells of course, which is why we are considered HER2 positive, but not enough to make our immune system notice.



The vaccine is just a boatload of the naked DNA gene that produces HER2 . It makes your body produce tons of HER2, enough that your immune system wakes up and says, HOLY CRAP WHAT WAS THAT, and it sends of a gazillion killer T-cells that start killing anything that expresses HER2, including your sneaky little cancer cells :)

Basically, the vaccine teaches your immune system to attack your cancer, not ignore it.

No side effects, and after 6 months after taking the vaccine and not being on treatment, subjects are showing no sign of cancer progression. So if this gets cleared, it means I (and anyone/everyone else) won't have to be on Herceptin for the rest of our lives.

They have had so much success with the pretrials, they have already started the process with an improved vaccine, even though the first vaccine is still recruiting for its clinical trials. Here is the full article.

So HER2+ people, if you don't have any sign of disease and you want to join the trial, there are tons going on right now. I am not going to because I want more flexibility right now in my treatment to add and take away different drugs, but I am going to get me some of that vaccine when I am done with this!