One of the things I enjoyed most about my pediatric career was making hospital rounds, whether at Children’s Hospital or Cedars Sinai. The key to being on rounds is listening to the story with your intellect and training but also with your imagination. Using all of your skills can bring to the story something that makes everything fit, a diagnosis. Listening to the story, a possible diagnosis comes to mind and then you recommend a test that can prove the diagnosis. Medical tests are not equal, a negative test gives much less information that a positive diagnostic test.
On July 6, 2009 journalist Jill Adams wrote two articles in the Health section of the Los Angeles Times discussing cancer vaccines. Despite years of development and the promise of a therapeutic breakthrough, cancer vaccines have been a disappointment. She described that three cancer vaccines, against prostate cancer, melanoma, and lymphoma have achieved positive results in clinical trials. Reading this article with the same mindset as listening on rounds, I realize that there is an essential flaw in the current system of cancer vaccine development. Every cancer needs its own unique vaccine.
Thinking imaginatively, what if there was a universal cancer biomarker coating the surface of every cancer cell? A universal cancer biomarker would make a universal cancer vaccine possible. Is this fantasy or a hypothesis? If there is a universal cancer biomarker coating the plasma membrane of every cancer cell, why hasn’t all the years of biomedical research and the billions of dollars spent every year discovered it?
I remember being on rounds once and being praised by a white haired old doctor who said that in order to diagnose something you must think of it. In order to discover the universal cancer biomarker you must think outside the normal convention of research parameters.
Those who have read my book and my online newsletters know about my patent for the diagnostic use of apocrine sweat. I search for a cancer biomarker that would be diagnostic for cancer and describe a non-invasive test that can be self – administered. What I have never shared in writing before is that I believe and hypothesize that this universal cancer biomarker would also make possible a universal cancer vaccine. My loss of licensure and access to a lab and patients has prevented me from making this discovery but it is also true that my desire to own this biomarker has also prevented me from giving this vision to the world in its fullness.
The apocrine gland is present in the armpit and groin at the base of every hair shaft. It is the evolutionary reason we still have hair in our armpits and groin. I have documented that PSA, urea nitrogen, THC (from marijuana), breast cancer biomarker CA 15-3, and a patented tumor stroma biomarker are all concentrated in apocrine sweat from blood in disease states. I have seen with my own eyes the biomarker I seek in an apocrine sweat specimen that was frozen for six months and then desiccated. It was present as a large amount perhaps 30% of the precipitate in the sample.
Dogs are able to detect cancer in their masters. Apocrine sweat is the physiology that allows dogs to smell that their masters have cancer. The biomarkers deposited on the hair shaft break down into volatile components that travel in the air to the dog’s nose. The biomarker breaks down with just a little heat and bacterial action. This means that the biomarker is a very fragile protein.
Perhaps by putting this information out in this form, openly, someone who has access to cancer patients and a proteomics lab will want to go forward with my research. Maybe someone working with cancer vaccines will see the merit in my hypothesis. The magic of science is that it will prove or disprove a hypothesis. All it takes is collecting the apocrine sweat of a patient with active cancer in their bodies and doing proteomic analysis of that specimen. My universal cancer biomarker is either there or it isn’t. If it is then a universal cancer vaccine will also be there as well.
Love and light, Namaste and shalom,
Stuart
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