One patient's journey testing a cancer vaccine
No one had to tell Jeanne Myers about melanoma's propensity for staging relentless comebacks after surgery and chemotherapy. In 1998, when she enrolled in a clinical trial of the melanoma vaccine developed by Dana-Farber's Glenn Dranoff, MD, Myers had already endured six separate bouts with the disease.
Jeanne Myers
Diagnosed in 1989 with a melanoma tumor on her left arm, Myers, who lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Tom, would over the next nine years have recurrences in her breast (twice), small intestine (three times), and on the right side of her abdomen. The treatments for these reappearances — sometimes surgery alone, sometimes surgery followed by the drug interferon — would appear to succeed for a while (in one case, for just two weeks), only to be followed by what she came to view as the disease's inevitable return.
In March of 1998, when the tumor in her abdomen first appeared, her doctor told Myers that she might be a good candidate for the vaccine clinical trial being conducted at Dana-Farber. Her oncologist at the Institute, Stephen Hodi, MD, explained that a portion of her tumor would be removed and mixed with a harmless virus that would carry a critical gene into the tumor cells. The "transfected" tumor cells would then be returned to her body in bi-weekly injections over the course of a year, hopefully triggering an immune response.
Today, more than three years after the trial's completion, the disease has made no major reappearances. Myers visits the Institute every few months for a checkup that includes extensive blood work and occasional CT scans.
While it's impossible to know whether the vaccine has thwarted her cancer, Myers is both optimistic and appreciative. "I can't say enough about Dr. Hodi," she attests. "He has always explained things in a way I can understand, and he's very thorough."
One reason for her optimism is the fact that the moles on her skin have tiny white "halos" around them. "That's a sign," she says, "that there's an immune response going on."
