AN ANTI-CANCER VACCINE? Nope, not yet

         X-Country skiing, in Canada

According to Google this is the 574^th blog entry I have inflicted on you since March of 2012.  In other words, I have been writing these things for over six years, at a rate of about 95 per year.  I hope they have done some good.  Lately, however, I have begun to realize that I am growing non-selective, and repetitious.  For instance, I have written about immunotherapy 38 times, over a span of nearly six years.  What happens is that my sources often make the new process or discovery they are discussing sound like sliced bread, Teflon, or the internet – real society-shaking breakthroughs.  But in general they aren’t.  My tendency is to get all excited, and blog away.  No more, by golly!  From now on I intend to write only about  such things as strike me as certainly significant, useful compilations of information – or just plain interesting.

Partly I am doing this because I can’t keep up with my daily deluge of emailed information.  For instance, somewhere in the last few days I skimmed an interesting blurb about the new FDA director, who is endeavoring to speed up the drug-approval process.  A worthy ambition, certainly – but I have totally lost the article.  Anyway, it appears that we don’t have to hate the Feds quite so much now, at least for the time being.

For something useful to end this blog:  An outfit called Taplmmune, based in Jacksonville, predicts that by 2022 they will have perfected a “vaccine” against OVCA.  This on the basis of a Phase I trial involving ten women with ovarian cancer!  To me, a vaccine is something you somehow ingest in order to avoid getting a disease.  This stuff, with luck, may give a woman six extra months of remission.  I don’t deny the value of another half-year of healthy life; I would have given anything to have had Linda alive and happy an extra  six months.  So Taplmmune’s new concoction may be useful  - but a vaccine it ain’t.

http://news.wjct.org/post/jacksonville-based-company-says-new-cancer-vaccine-could-be-available-2022