Week 41 in the war on cancer has been fought on Mallorca where we are spending some time with Dyanne’s parents. Here are the highlights:

-Dyanne has been in very good shape. And the sun has been shining on Mallorca 🙂

-Our personalized peptide vaccine is, finally, ready. Dyanne will get the first injection in Frankfurt on Thursday this coming week. Crossing our fingers.

-If you are fighting cancer, knowledge is a good thing. The biggest cancer meeting in the world (the ASCO annual meeting) is currently ongoing in Chicago. Patients, patient advocates and care-givers can get access to pretty much the whole conference through a “virtual meeting” (http://shop.asco.org/amvc16_2016-annual-meeting-virtual-me…/) that costs $250 if you send an email to and ask for it.

-Someone else is obviously also a bit fed up with the fact that knowledge about how to fix cancer is not disseminated freely to all patients and caregivers. So they set up what seems to be a Napster for scientific articles. I have not tested it a lot yet, but seems quite good: http://sci-hub.cc/.

-If anyone wonders what we have learned out of from ASCO so far, here are a couple of things: (1) It seems local therapy can be good to combine with systemic therapy (http://abstract.asco.org/176/AbstView_176_169928.html); (2) it seems that EGFR positive lung cancer patients derive little benefit from the new immunotherapies such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab when used as monotherapies (http://abstract.asco.org/176/AbstView_176_167384.html); (3) if you have smoked and have lung cancer, then combining nivolumab and low dose ipilimumab seems like a very very good idea (this abstract is only telling part of the exciting story: http://meetinglibrary.asco.org/content/163524-176); and (4) if you have lung cancer and have not smoked, then combining nivolumab and ipilimumab may still be a quite good idea – but the fine print coming with this finding is important to read (same abstract as in (3)).

-We are still looking into Cuban vaccines and after a rather long detour it may seem like Vaxira (racotumomab) could be a good choice. No decision yet, but seems interesting.

-Dyanne’s video to raise awareness of lung cancer (youtube.com/watch?v=Vyy08jP33K8) has reached more than 6000 views! Thanks to everyone who has shared it.

Thanks to Dyanne’s parents for babysitting (while I am reading ASCO research) and thanks to the Spanish people who have invented Mallorca. Pretty nice place.