An Oregon man, given less than a year to live, had a complete remission of advanced deadly skin cancer after an experimental treatment that revved up his immune system to fight the tumors. The 52-year-old patient's dramatic turnaround was the only success in a small study, leading doctors to be cautious in their enthusiasm. However, the treatment reported in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine is being counted as the latest in a small series of successes involving immune-priming treatments against deadly skin cancers. "Immunotherapy has become the most promising approach" to late-stage, death-sentence skin cancers, said Dr. Darrell Rigel, a dermatology researcher at the New York University Cancer Institute in New York who had no role in the research. Still, the immune-priming experiments have yet to yield a consistent therapy. Even researchers who worked on the experiment involving nine patients and just one success are quick to couch the result. "This is only one patient," said study co-author Dr. Cassian Yee of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,368902,00.html
Alongside the other recent thread on cancer treatments in this forum, I am encouraged at the new directions cancer treatment is exploring.
The sad thing abut the human body is that we all tend to have different reactions to different treatments. Where one treatment could be successful in one patient it could fail another. So, the more options we have to fight all these cancers the better, and it's nice to hear that we're finally starting to chip away at it. Down here (not sure if you guys have it yet or if we're just the guinea pigs ) we now have a cervical cancer vaccine that helps destroy/prevent the growth of cervical cancel cells. I don't think it'll be long (imo) before we see a few more of this type of thing popping up.
If we're thinking of the same thing, I see it advertised pretty heavily in my doctor's office. For young women, right?
Yeah, its becoming well advertised here in the US. There was a huge flap here in Texas when the governor was about to make this vaccine mandatory for girls at the age of like 14 or something, lots of privacy issues popped up, not sure what happened to it tbh. Anyway, great to see different breakthroughs in this field. The biggest problem with cancer seems to be that the body usually doesnt recognize it, so getting your immune system to find and destroy cancer cells is a huge breakthrough, even if not consistent. Great news all around.
probably is... we have it free for women under 26, it's over AU$400 otherwise. I only found the latter out the other day so glad I had mine done already
