More congratulations! You worked hard for this.
Yaay!! Happy beyond words for you and for him. Sounds like this will only get easier. Not that raising a teen is easy exactly, but the less extra crapola you have to deal with without appropriate support the better.
Happy Weasels Day!
Thanks for all your updates, keep 'em coming, even as he gets his third doctorate or Nobel Prize.
Oh, do post this in the monthly mini-rants where your support group has been invested in your saga.
This story made me weepy:
Hopefully this makes prosthetics cheaper and more accessible. I’m no expert, though.
And this seems like an idea that would be valuable all over the world. Congrats to the award winner:
Crane operator lifts man from top of burning building …
scary biscuits !!
I’m glad that Russia won’t get their mitts on this treasure.
Cat at my local train station …
I might take a walk down there !
A vaccine for an aggressive form of breast cancer may be only five years away. Here’s hoping that it works, and perhaps sparks ideas for other vaccines. Breast cancer vaccine now in early clinical trials: What to know - ABC News
The term “Phase I” means they proved their vaccine didn’t immediately and obviously harm the test subjects. Nothing more.
For sure it would be totally excellent if Phases 2 & 3, which attempt to show that the vaccine delivers results, would come out well. Triple negative BC is a nasty, nasty disease responsible for a lot of human suffering.
A problem with vaccine development, as opposed to treatment development, is you’re looking for the long-term statistical dog that didn’t bark. IOW
We vaccinated a bunch of people. A couple got cancer later. In the general unvaccinated population we’d expect a couple more to have gotten cancer. Does our vaccine deserve the credit for the difference or was it luck or some other unnoticed factor?
The way to honestly resolve that difference is with decade-long trials involving tens of thousands of participants. The cheap way is a 1-2 year trial with a hundred participants then out-shout the naysayers.
IMO that article is essentially a press release by the CEO saying “Buy our stock!”
TL/DR: I think the study was more like investigating treatment of disease with a conventional drug than investigating prophlaxis via a vaccination program
I don’t think this is true in this case.
Yes, vaccines are typically given to healthy persons for the purpose of preventing disease; this “vaccine” isn’t (in this study). (There’s a specific term for this sort of immunotherapy in Europe, but I can’t remember it - I’m suffering from being too long retired).
From the press release
Patients who had been curatively treated for TNBC [triple negative breast cancer] received three vaccinations given once every two weeks. IFNγ and IL-17, which are T cell immune response indicators (cellular immunity), and antibody production (B cell humoral immunity) were measured to evaluate the vaccination effect.
My bold. And from another article
“Our goal is to initially evaluate the vaccine’s ability to prevent recurrence of cancer in survivors, and continue with extension studies to eventually determine its effectiveness in preventing the initial onset of TNBC.” …
[and in further patient cohorts]
…The first cohort is currently assessing the vaccine along with Keytruda (pembrolizumab) in post-operative breast cancer patients with residual disease after receiving neoadjuvant chemo-immunotherapy.
So as I understand it this study is about treatment of cancer patients (I assume the patients’ treatment must have left residual cancer to produce a recurrence; but we’re above my pay grade here). I don’t know whether we should consider this to be like the conventional use of vaccines, but restricted to a super-high risk group; or simply treatment of disease. This article then goes on to talk about using the drug more like a conventional vaccine, but restricted to a high risk group (patients with BRCA1, BRCA2, or PALB2 mutation.)
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ETA: This
-is of course correct and important.
This week in therapy, Wee Weasel said, and I quote, “I want to play with friends.”
!!!
Thank you for your information!
That’s awesome!
Here’s a happy story for the holidays. A remarkable young man.
Beautiful story. Sounds like he will go far.
Bump!
I had no idea Dolly was an LGTBTQ ally, but it doesn’t particularly surprise me, because she’s awesome.
Yeah, she is one person I can accept as a real Christian.
Cape Verde is malaria free for the first time in 50 years!
Scored some Huy Fong chili garlic sauce at the store today! They’ve been out of stock forever.