Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee gets six or seven e-mails a day from desperate cancer patients and family members, pleading for help or for a spot in one of her studies.
The Johns Hopkins University researcher keeps two of these entreaties tacked to a wall in her office. One is from a 13-year-old Alaska boy whose father was dying of pancreatic cancer. The boy begs Jaffee for help: "You have to save my dad. He's my best friend."
The other is from a 16-year-old Kansas girl who had already lost her mother to breast cancer. Now her grandmother has pancreatic cancer -- if she dies, too, the girl writes, there will be no one to help pick out a prom dress.
In both cases, the cancer had progressed too far, and the patients weren't eligible for Jaffee's trials.
"You just sit there and look at them," Jaffee said of the notes. "It keeps you going."
For the past 16 years, Jaffee has been developing a vaccine for pancreatic cancer. Last week, she and her colleague, Dr. Dan Laheru, announced some good news: Their vaccine significantly improved survival rates in a small group of patients.
The results were released at a joint meeting in Philadelphia of the American Association for Cancer Research, the National Cancer Institute and the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer.
"If these results hold up, it's better than anyone's done before," said Laheru, 37, an oncologist at Hopkins' Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It's extremely exciting."
Jaffee, 45, began working on pancreatic cancer in part because it is so difficult to treat. The disease is extremely lethal: 30,000 Americans are diagnosed annually, and almost all die within a year. Although it is the 10th-most-common cancer, it is the fourth-deadliest.
Patients commonly don't notice any symptoms until too late. "It can come on very silently," Laheru says. "By the time they get diagnosed, the cancer has spread."
The road to their recent success has been long and winding. Jaffee began her work in 1989, injecting laboratory mice with thousands of different molecules, trying to discover which might help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells.
Normally, these malignant cells can avoid detection by the immune system -- a key reason that cancer can grow and spread in the body.
After several years, she and some colleagues came across a protein called granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor, or GM-CSF, which seemed to direct immune cells to cancers.
