Encouragement needed to decide whether to join a vaccine trial

[bejuce]

Hi everyone,

I've been thinking of joining a vaccine trial for a while now that I've been off Herceptin since July. This trial here is currently recruiting patients at Berkeley, CA, and I'm pretty much almost all set to join it. I was hoping to do it at Stanford, but my oncologist has moved on to Genentech and the trial was discontinued there.

I'll have my first consultation at Alta Bates on the 18th, to sign the consent forms, get my labs done, be examined, and do a chest ray and echo. The next step is to perform an apheresis to I think extract some cells to be used in the engineering or analysis of the vaccine. One of the concerns I have is that the nurse told me over the phone that they'll have to use both my arms for this procedure, including my right arm under which I removed 13 lymph nodes. I still have my port in place hoping for exactly this - that I'd be able to use for a vaccine trial. Since I won't, sounds like it's time for me to get rid of it after all.

I'm strongly leaning towards joining this trial, but before I do so, I'd like to hear from those of you in vaccine trials elsewhere how you're dealing with their side effects and so on. The vaccine I'll be taking consists of a fixed monthly dose for a 6-month period - no major side effects have been reported.

My main concern with this is whether the vaccine won't backfire and instead of slowing tumor progression or prevent its recurrence, it'll actually stimulate its growth. Not sure if that's possible, so those of you (Lani?) that are much more versed in the biological sciences and understand it, can you please offer me your two cents? I'm basically looking for that extra pinch of courage to move forward and not look back and regret my decision.

Thank you in advance for your input and hope that 2011 will be a year of many successes and good news for all of us!

Marcia