By Article by Stephanie Desmon, Photos by Chiaki Kawajiri , stephanie.desmon@baltsun.com and chiaki.kawajiri@baltsun.com|October 12, 2008
For the past two days, Annie Siple has patiently crisscrossed the Johns Hopkins medical campus for test after test, being scanned by big machines, pricked with small needles, fastened to electrodes, injected with dye. Soon she will find out who is winning, Annie or the cancer. Not for one minute has she worried about the results.
How could the news be bad, she is wondering when she is led into a tiny exam room. She looks and feels terrific on this May afternoon. Her cancer appeared first in her breast. Before the year was out, it had spread to her liver. But she hasn't felt sick, not for one day. Even when she was supposed to take off from her demanding job as a Disney World waitress, she couldn't stay away. She had too much energy to burn.
Siple has been leaving her husband and her college student son at their rancher outside Orlando, Fla., over the past three months, grabbing early-morning flights and bumming rides from virtual strangers to get to the Baltimore hospital. Once a month, as part of a small clinical trial, she has been injected with 12 doses of an experimental treatment received by about 40 other women with terminal, Stage IV breast cancer. She still doesn't know how her body is reacting to this new compound.
Siple, 43, climbs onto the examination table, its white paper crinkling beneath her as she absently swings her legs, flashing that bright smile that makes her friends wherever she goes. Dr. Leisha Emens, the 46-year-old Hopkins oncologist who devised the treatment, sits stiffly in a desk chair, a thick medical file in her hands.
Emens believes she can train the body's immune system to attack cancer cells. For now it is an experimental treatment for the sickest of patients, but the research she is doing, while a long shot, could lay the groundwork for a vaccine to prevent breast cancer. Despite all the progress that has been made, once the disease spreads, there's no cure. About 40,000 American women die of it every year.
Therapeutic vaccines are the new frontier for researchers of many forms of cancer, a tool to add to the long-standing arsenal of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Vaccines have been developed to prevent infection from most strains of the virus that causes cervical cancer. But no one has yet been able to develop a vaccine that would thwart other kinds of cancer that are not caused by viruses. Roughly 100 clinical trials for cancer vaccines are under way, including several at Hopkins for cancers of the pancreas and prostate as well as leukemia and others.
