Breast Cancer Research & The Tumor Vaccine Group @ UW

I donate 50% of my profits from "pink ribbon" products on an online gallery I run to the Tumor Vaccine Group at the University of Washington.

Here is an ABC News story about how the donations of all supporters are helping to fund the cure to breast cancer.

Check out my gallery here and you can help fund the cure too!

Searching for a Breast Cancer Vaccine
Shot of Promise: One Patient's Efforts to Find a Cure
By JOHN MCKENZIE
Nov. 13, 2008—

Ingrid Eikineas, of South Hingham, Mass., was only 35 years old when doctors told her last year that she had breast cancer. The disease had already spread to her bones and liver. It was that aggressive.

"The message was: start talking to your kids about not being around," she said.

But Ingrid had other ideas. She began extensive treatment, including radiation and chemotherapy. After a year of treatment, amazingly, she has no signs of cancer. To stay cancer-free, she still takes the drug Herceptin. But she knows that eventually, in most women, the drug stops working and the cancer returns.

"So we know that day is coming," she said. "So in anticipation of that, we try to be a step ahead of the game."

For Ingrid, that meant testing an experimental breast cancer vaccine, which tries to use her own immune system to target and kill breast cancer cells whenever they might re-appear.

Click here for information on clinical trials.

"I'm enthused about this vaccine because it targets a protein that is actually involved in causing the cancer," said Dr. Norah Disis, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Oncology at University of Washington and lead investigator of the vaccine's latest clinical trial.

The vaccine targets a protein specific to "HER-2 positive" breast cancers, which accounts for roughly 25 percent of all breast cancer in the United States. This month, Ingrid received the first of six shots.

"This vaccine stimulates the type of immune response that creates inflammation, or a danger signal, at the site of the tumor and allows the tumor to appear more foreign to the immune system and create a vigorous immune response" Disis told ABC News.

Breast Cancer Vaccine in Clinical Trials

In preliminary tests, that vigorous immune response often lasted eight years or longer in breast cancer patients.

"We were surprised because in general it had been thought that patients with cancer, [that] their immune systems couldn't be stimulated this way," Disis said.

This vaccine is just one of a least 40 now being tested. Many focus on different targets and different types of breast cancers. Researchers should know the results within the next five to 10 years. If the vaccine can keep breast cancer from returning, the next step would be to see if the vaccines, administered much earlier, could protect women from ever developing breast cancer.

"The likelihood, long-term, of a vaccine therapy being useful is quite high," said Dr. Jack Erban, director of the breast-cancer program at Massachusetts General Hospital. "I am not certain which vaccine, or what type of vaccine, and I think that pioneers like Ingrid make it closer to a day when there will be a vaccine."

But for women determined to remain cancer free, these experiments hold promise for a future without cancer.

"If you value life and your loved ones, and your role as a mother, you're going to do whatever you can to stay there," Ingrid said, reading to her daughter. "I'm not ready to leave yet."

To learn more about breast cancer vaccines and a list of where they're being tested, click here: www.tumorvaccinegroup.org.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

Traveling

I just had a conversation with a friend about traveling.

She's about to take off for a trip to New Zealand to go bungee jumping and to Tasmania so she can see a Tasmanian Devil in person.

I soooo wish I was tagging along on that trip!

I'm not absolutely certain I'm interested in the bungee jumping, but traveling in and of itself just sounds so incredibly fabulous and I've not been on a trip out of the country since the summer of 2006 when I went to Costa Rica (a highly recommended destination, by the way).

I also really want to go to New York City. I've loved being in cities my entire life. I lived in Portland, Oregon when I was little, moved to several small towns and itty-bitty-cities and then came to Seattle where I've been for the past 11 years.

I've visited Los Angeles several other bigger than itty-bitty cities on the West coast, but visions of NY have always dazzled me.

I want to experience the city that never sleeps. I can't live there now though as I have children and raising children in NYC just wouldn't be my cup of tea. Seattle is big enough for that.

Maybe once all of my children have moved out of the house, I will relocate to the East coast.

I guess it would be a good idea to visit first to make sure I love it as much as I've imagined I do.

Curve Balls

I find it interesting how life throws us curve balls and somehow we manage to catch most of them and toss them right back.

Once in a while one of those balls goes awry and hits us square in the face and maybe even knocks us down. But we can always get back up and get back in the game again.

Can you imagine yourself running around a field chasing after a ball that someone else has on a string and as soon as you get close to it, they pull the string so that the ball goes bounding off in another direction only for you to go chasing after it yet again?

Why would you continue to chase after this ball that seems eternally out of reach? Is it because attempting to get to something is all that the game is about? Is it that if there were no challenge, you would become uninterested and forget about the ball entirely?

Curve balls come in all shapes, colors and sizes. And they come for an infinite number of reasons.

Look out, there's another one headed straight for your left arm!