Good News Sundays - Something New From Me

Much needed good news delivered to you every Sunday morning.

Hey everyone, today I want to do something new. Each week I dedicate my time to speaking out about what is happening in our country and keeping this community informed. But I also know what a burden the news can be. I feel it. You feel it. I’ve even written about it recently.

That’s why I today I am introducing a new weekly feature where, every Sunday, I bring you good news that matters. Maybe it’s one important story. Maybe it’s a list of them. Maybe it’s a funny video that made me laugh. Regardless, Sundays should be days for rest, family, and reflection and I wanted my work to reflect that.

So, please let me know in the comments what you think about this idea. And if you have a great news story yourself, please drop a link so we can see!

This week’s story involved a topic that just about every family must face at some point: cancer. And there is a category of cancer that doctors have long described with a phrase that lands like a verdict: nothing to be done. Pancreatic cancer. Glioblastoma. Stage four melanoma. Cancers that, by the time you find them, have already won most of the fight. For decades, the honest answer from oncologists to patients with these diagnoses was: we can slow this, but we probably cannot stop it. That answer is starting to change.

The same mRNA technology that produced the COVID vaccines in record time — the platform that much of the country argued about for two years — is now being turned against cancer. And the early results are the kind of thing that researchers describe with words they don’t use often in science.

Here is how it works. Traditional cancer treatment tries to destroy tumors from the outside in — with radiation, chemotherapy, surgery. mRNA cancer vaccines take a different approach. They read the DNA of a patient’s own tumor, identify the specific mutations that make those cells malignant, and then instruct the immune system to find and destroy cells carrying those exact mutations. It is, in the most literal sense, a vaccine tailored to one person’s cancer.

In melanoma, the results so far are striking. A personalized vaccine reduced cancer recurrence by 44 percent compared to the best existing immunotherapy drug alone. Five-year follow-up data shows a sustained 49 percent reduction in the risk of recurrence or death. That is not a marginal improvement. That is the kind of number that changes treatment protocols.

But the pancreatic cancer results are the ones that have scientists genuinely emotional. Nearly all of the patients who responded to a personalized mRNA vaccine in an early pancreatic cancer trial are still alive six years later. That’s a genuinely hopeful result. Simply put, Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal diagnoses in medicine. The five-year survival rate for the most common form is around 12 percent. Experts had long believed the disease was simply too immunologically cold for vaccines to work, that the immune system could not be taught to attack it. Recent vaccine advancements proved that wrong.

There are now more than 120 active clinical trials of mRNA cancer vaccines across lung, breast, prostate, colorectal, and brain cancers. The leading researchers are clear that the mRNA platform is superior to what came before it because it is fast, potent, flexible, and scalable. And with more than two billion COVID vaccine doses administered, there is now an extensive safety record that no prior cancer vaccine platform could claim.

There is an irony here I just can’t ignore. The mRNA platform survived years of political attack, skepticism, and institutional resistance. The science kept moving anyway. Researchers kept showing up. And the tool that was built under emergency conditions to fight a respiratory pandemic is now the most promising weapon humanity has ever had against the disease that kills more than 600,000 Americans every year. Whatever you think about how COVID was handled, the platform it produced may turn out to be one of the most consequential medical achievements in history. And that, my friends, is good news for you Sunday.

I hope you take today to rest, spend time with loved ones, and recharge before a busy week ahead.