Immunotherapy does work

Did you see the response to the Duke U. trials for brain gliomas using genetically altered polio viruses. I wish I had the reference, but it should "google up". Exciting stuff on the horizon.......................Dave

This is exactly why I have doubts about chemo--it tears down your immune system which seem counterintuitive to me. Almost halfway thru FolFox/Avastin and I hate hate hate how it makes me feel. REscanned after next treatment--not sure what to do about continuing. 

There are substantial immune building and immune modulating therapies available today, just not from (y)our oncologists from/in the West.  We observed substantial immune responses to my wife's cancer, from the beginning in  2010, and have added improvements in subsequent years.   We have been able to support and improve immune function with nutraceuticals.

Some immune modulating items commercially available include cimetidine, various glycans and proteo-glycans including various mushroom extracts  like PSK, yeast extracts, vitamin D3.  Also inflammation modifying supplements and drugs will at least indirectly modulate the immune responses too.  Even the most successful high dollar experimental treatments are often ecstatic over partial responses and the occassional complete response, that might be available in your own home today or by inexpensive mail order.

Japan has combined some of these into immunochemo options for years.  Most patients don't realize how thorough that they and their (integrative) providers need to be  to optimally marry them to a chemo plan successfully, to get solid responses.   In our experience, metronomic (daily) chemo with a nice 5FU oral drug (UFT) was key to maintaining and improving immune function with supplements and off label drugs.  Others have had some success with Xeloda backbones, but it does seem harder to bear long term than UFT.

I have chatted with the first patient that had this therapy and her husband. It's Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes at the National Cancer Institute and it was for CRC. She has KRAS G12D and she had at least one of the Alleles required for the therapy. KRAS G12D, the most common genetic mutation in CRC and Pancreatic Cancer, is a mutation inside the cell. Immunotherapy can only target tumor cells with signals on the surface of the cell. So finding a targetted cure for KRAS has been mostly a failure for several decades. Folks with the Alleles HLA-A-11:01 and HLA-C-08:02 express KRAS G12D and KRAS G12D on the cell surface. There are at least two other Alleles that this works for as well. HLA-A-11:01 is in probable about 30% of people of Asian decent. But it isn't common otherwise. HLA-C-08:02 is relatively uncommon. So this specific treatment is not applicable to a lot of people. I think that one of the ideas is that they can get past the Allele requirements.

For other mutations, they will have to identify them and the alleles which present to the cell surface so that they can be targetted. I have KRAS G12D and am Asian so this would have been interesting to me but you have to be Stage IV to be in the trial. I know that Dana Farber has built or is in the process of building a cell manufacturing center which could manufacture the white blood cells for this therapy.

So exciting and promising but there are a lot of restrictions, so far, on who this would work for. It's best to read the underlying papers on the cases to get a lot of the details of the requirements. This could become more generally available but it will take a lot of time and effort to make a lot of progress.

A lot of people say that chemo tears down your immune system, (which it does), but anyone who has been going through chemo can tell you that the body does bounce back.  I’m on my 30th infusion of Folfoxiri, you feel pretty terrible for a few days, but you do bounce back. We are all different, some have an easier time with chemo than others.  But the human immune system comes back amazingly quick Considering what the chemo does to it.