An Unlikely Couple

It’s official. On my 41^st birthday I can confirm that the personalised immunotherapy vaccine I started in Germany back in 2019 did indeed work in combination with the low dose chemo to completely eliminate the pesky new tumour that appeared in September last year.

The bloodwork investigations I went through in March revealed that despite my last vaccine injection being in July 2021, 1.7 years ago, it’s still active in my body and astonishingly had started producing CD4+ and CD8+ T cells with subsequent antibodies that were destroying the cancerous cells.

The vaccine may have been dormant for the new tumour to have appeared but what we now know is that it was woken up when I started chemo again. Normally chemotherapy and immunotherapy aren’t considered great partners as chemo can affect the immune system too strongly but in this case, largely by coincidence they worked together perfectly to form a brilliant duo.

When I was immediately put on chemo after the tumour showed on my scan, I was insistent that it was a very low dose. There was a multitude of reasons for this but ultimately it ended up ensuring my immune system stayed strong enough for immunotherapy to work.

As the chemo started to do its job of killing even a few cancer cells, they started shedding their DNA, a standard procedure when cancer cells die but, in this case, it acted like an alarm bell to the sleepy vaccine alerted by the DNA and kicked back in.

Just 4 months after the tumour appeared, it was destroyed by a perfect balance of 4 cycles of low dose chemo plugging away and a highly trained vaccine picking up the pieces. Last week evidence of this winning combination made my oncologist feel comfortable enough to end my standard of care treatment early for the 2nd time, knowing that we know how to deal with it in the future should we need to.

How incredibly glorious and surprising science can be.

I say to patients through work and anyone I have the pleasure of speaking to, you never know how science and our understanding of cancer is going to progress and for sure, it can take forever but it can also change quickly too. When I was diagnosed over 4.5 years ago I was told point blank by an incredibly forceful doctor that “Immunotherapy Does. Not. Work for brain cancer”. Well look at me now Mr.

This particular treatment will definitely take many more years, if not decades to be accepted and accessible as it’s still considered experimental but the fact that this has happened to me and in conjunction, NOT against standard of care treatment, will hopefully help other doctors to at least be a little less fearful. That’s not to say that it works for everyone, sadly that’s really not true and I know many that it hasn’t done but if it opens minds to what can happen even to a few lucky souls which can then be built on, surely that’s worth exploring.

It is also a huge and very exciting development to see all the Covid vaccine manufacturers saying they will be using the same mRNA technology to develop their own cancer vaccines. With that kind of force behind these concepts, it has the power to go much quicker.

In the meantime, there’s been a big shift in understanding and perception of immunotherapy working for brain cancer and the concept is far more widely accepted since I was diagnosed in 2018. In fact, that same Dr prescribes immunotherapy drugs now to people like me which at least shows how individuals can change too. From nothing to a glimmer, this makes me very confident that should it come back again my body knows what to do and if it needs some extra help that will be available too.

The message I am trying to make here is to know that however bleak it may seem, however negative your medical team might feel, no one can say if you might be the one to defy the odds long enough for the medical world to catch up. I’m not special, I just took an educated and informed chance on a low risk, safe but experimental treatment and was exceedingly lucky that it paid off. Someone recently told me their relative did exactly the same with chemotherapy in the 1970s, everyone thought she was crazy but look how that turned out! I can’t wait to look back in 30 years and baffle my grandchildren with this story too.

*If any clinician wants to know more about the vaccine and these results please just get in contact and yes the clinic will also be using them in the report they are publishing. Thanks.