Emens started her first study in February 2004, injecting 28 women with the vaccine and with varying doses of chemotherapy meant to prime the immune system to attack. Siple is part of a second trial that began in December 2006 and still needs to enroll more women. The women receive the vaccine, a low dose of chemo and another drug - Herceptin - known to fight a certain form of aggressive breast cancer.
A life of hard work
Annie Siple married young, not long after graduating from high school, and had kids soon after. That marriage didn't last, but Siple had her boys, Christopher Cummings, now 23, and Jeremy Cummings, 19. She spent a long time as a single mom finding her way and making ends meet working as a waitress, a job she has done (and loved) since she was 16. Desk jobs aren't for her. She thrives on the physical labor of being a server and on the contact with perfect strangers. Siple got remarried three years ago.
Christopher moved to Miami not long after his mother's breast cancer was diagnosed. He couldn't handle what was happening to her. Jeremy had trouble concentrating on college in the wake of the diagnosis, taking a semester off to cope. It is not just little ones who worry about their moms.
Being told she had breast cancer in May 2006 "totally threw the rug out from under my feet," Siple says. She had a lumpectomy followed by six days of radiation. Reeling from a diagnosis she couldn't handle, Siple refused chemotherapy.
She had always been curious about more natural remedies, not convinced that Western medicine held all of the answers. She had long been a believer in organic food and juicing, open to just about anything, no matter how quirky it might seem. So over the next six months, she paid $20,000 to a man who treated her with what she called a "very strict protocol, mostly with Chinese herbs." She had coffee enemas, ate a diet devoid of yeast, sugar, pork and shellfish, took digestive enzymes. She used a series of contraptions she believed would kill pathogens in her body with audio frequencies and then restore her energy pathways.
At the end of those six months, Siple again got bad news. The cancer was now in her liver.
Wary, but willing
Siple learned about the Hopkins vaccine through an early participant who appeared cancer-free. Still wary of fully embracing traditional medicine, she saw the vaccine as the next best thing to alternative medicine, something that would harness the body's healing power to go after cancer's mutant cells without the side effects of most cancer drugs.
