Question:
Could someone help me out please? I know that this is off topic but I
am trying to help out a friend who's father has cancer and he wants to
learn more about the meds and therapies.
Answer:
I have a friend with metastasized melanoma, he has several tumors and is
currently in phase 1 trials for using salmonella. He has also tried the
new vaccines and has had extensive interferon and interleukin
treatments. His tumors have not grown and he has beaten the odds for
survival. I haven't heard if the salmonella treatment have been
effective. He flies to the National Institute of Health every month for
experimental treatments. Below is an article on the new vaccines:
Scientists think they can teach the human body to cure its own
cancer. Teach it to recognize cancer is evil. Teach it to find it. Teach
it to kill it. Rather than poison cancer with chemotherapy or burn it
with radiation, they envision harnessing the body's own immune system to
hunt down cancer and destroy it.
The approach is called a cancer vaccine, a term that may be
confusing. To most folks, a vaccine is a shot that wards off measles or
the flu. Those kinds of vaccines are intended to prime the body to keep
bacteria and viruses from taking root. They keep people well, but they
don't cure anything.
Cancer vaccines are like traditional ones in one important way: They
alert the body's immune defenses to dangerous things. But instead of
warning of germs, they offer the body a glimpse of its own good cells
gone bad. And instead of preventing disease, they are intended to rescue
those who are already sick.
Doctors have tinkered with cancer vaccines for a century, but now
evidence is building that they can work, though not as predictably or as
often as most would like. Just about every experimenter in the field
sees the occasional miraculous remission of a terminally ill patient.
Soon they hope the large studies under way will answer whether vaccines
are a practical new way to fight cancer.
On the surface, the strategy is satisfyingly simple: The body's
immune system already patrols for germs. Why not program it to do the
same for cancer? But nothing about cancer is simple.
