I caught that VICE, as well. "Reprogramming" otherwise deadly viruses to seek and destroy cancer cells. Remarkable. Cancer research hopefully has reached the tipping point. There seems to be amazing news about treatments for different kinds of cancers every couple of weeks.
We almost lost our youngest to cancer and now he's a 15-year survivor. I thought I had a pretty good idea how cancer treatment worked when he went in, but was floored by the mind-blowing things they did throughout the process. I ran into his primary doctor a couple of years ago and she said the treatment they used on him is dust in the rear-view mirror nowadays.
Treatments are progressing faster than ever before and one of the good things about the latest generation of treatments is that side-effects have fallen way off. Used to be if the cancer didn't kill you, the side-effects might. His doctor called our son "my poster child for side effects." He got hit with everything. They'd want permission to try something and they'd say there was a one-in-a-thousand chance that such-and-such side effect would happen, and BAM, he was the one.
I'm also encouraged by the fact that the newest and most successful treatments seem to be harnessing and enhancing the body's own defense systems to fight the cancer instead of poisoning the body to kill some cancer cells and then "rescuing" the patient from the poisoning and then starting over and over and over. When our son was sick, they said they were poisoning him for 24 hours and then rescuing him from the poison for 72 hours. They did that solid for 6 months and then on various schedules for two and half years. Seems more of a nightmare now, looking back on it than it actually did at the time. Damn.
