February 1, 2012 - Thank you for coming to this petition in Briggs’s memory. (In case you already know you want to sign, the link is to the right).
Briggs wanted to get immunotherapies–a word I hope you’ll help me make as familiar as “cancer”–on the fast track for everyone. In limited use in such respected medical centres as at Duke and Oxford universities, as a prime example of the successes being achieved with it in dozens of university hospitals, a patient in Los Angeles who was diagnosed with brain cancer at age 33 and given two months to live on chemotherapy and radiation is still cancer-free over eight years after getting a second opinion and being treated with immunotherapy at UCLA Medical Center.
In the wake of Steve Jobs’s passing, having done hundreds upon hundreds of hours of research after Briggs was diagnosed, and with all the quotes on his pancreatic cancer being incurable, I thought I’d see what I could find. Five years before he died, in the same venerable university in Germany where the X ray was discovered, immunotherapy brought a complete remission of liver metastases (versus Jobs having had a liver transplant), and after 6 months’ vaccination, “no evidence of the disease,” a complete remission of the 72-year-old patient’s stage IV pancreatic cancer.
And yet, far from new, immunotherapy, with none of the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, has existed since the early 1890s, well-documented not in alternative clinics but in such institutions as Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the Mayo Clinic, and Johns Hopkins, curing or inducing near-regression in even terminal patients. It’s also extremely inexpensive, and in the case of the one that dates back to the 1890s, unpatentable by pharmaceutical companies, and that lack of profit incentive has been part of the larger story, the details of which make for a shameful page from history.
Cancer cells disguise themselves from the immune system, whereas immunotherapy mobilizes the immune system through inactive bacteria or alerts it to the presence of cancer by the injection of proteins found only in the particular cancer cells and no healthy cells, which is why it’s so safe. There’s also a ‘helper’, the blocking of regulatory T-cells, which, fostered by cancer, dampen the immune system’s anti-tumor activity, and if we can bring that to the forefront at the same time, immunotherapies can be yet more widely and quickly effective.
Together, within years not decades, they can be turned into a gift to this era and to generations to come, not only for brain, pancreatic, and Briggs’s colorectal cancer but all solid-tumor cancers including breast, prostate, renal, lung, and sarcomas. Briggs had been making notes for a book, which I ended up writing in her memory, the petition and it tools to getting this into everyday conversation, on people’s minds, into the media as the most recurrent topic in the fight against cancer. I wanted to not get in the way of amassing signatures, but if you want to read a little more before signing, the prologue of the book gives more of an overview, and the more personal side of Briggs’s story, so I’ve put a PDF of it online at www.PhaethonWorld.com/Prologue.pdf.
In case you didn’t come to the petition from the signatories/photo page I set up, over twenty concerned stars and public figures have generously added their names, such as Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Naomi Watts, Elle Macpherson, Bradley Cooper, director Ken Burns, journalist Meredith Vieira, and tennis legends Billie Jean King and Chris Evert. They’re all listed at www.PhaethonWorld.com/PetitionForBriggs.html.
I hope you’ll join them and me. The sun and the moon and the stars all went out when I lost Briggs. Together, we can set in motion for cancer what Salk’s vaccine did for polio.
Thanks,
Paul
I sad because cancer is very bad