Experimental Vaccine Prolongs Dying Cancer Patient's Life
An experimental vaccine was Ryan DeGrand's last hope.
Durham, N.C., April 22, 2008— -- Developing an effective cancer vaccine has been a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine. Now researchers at Duke University Medical Center believe they might have one, harnessing the most effective and efficient of all disease fighters: the body's own immune system.
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It appears to have helped Ryan DeGrand.
DeGrand was living the American dream. Married with two children, he runs a successful golf equipment company in St. Louis, Mo.
Four years ago, at the age of 32, he started suffering from severe headaches. One weekend, the headaches were so bad he went to an emergency room. Doctors gave him a CT scan and discovered a tumor over his left eyebrow the size of a baseball.
Surgeons removed the tumor, but not the underlying disease. DeGrand was suffering from the most common, and deadly, form of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme. About 20,000 Americans are diagnosed with the cancer every year.
"I would cry a little bit here and there that no one would ever see," he said. "The biggest thing that scared me is not being there, leaving my wife with two kids. Those things are going through your head all the time."
DeGrand began radiation almost every day for six weeks and had 20 pills of chemotherapy every night. The median survival time for patients with this cancer is 14.6 months. It was even worse for DeGrand. For patients like him whose cancer expresses a specific protein, EGFRvIII, virtually no one is alive after two years.
His wife, Kathryn, vividly recalls the day doctors broke the news. "They threw a pamphlet at us and said, 'There's nothing. There is no cure to this. We can do what the standard treatment is but after that, we're sorry. There's nothing we can do.' And that was the most devastating day."
Ryan DeGrand would not accept that. He and his wife scoured the country looking for experimental treatments, which led them to the Duke University Medical Center. Doctors there were testing a vaccine to prevent those brain tumors from re-forming.
