Pregnant mom with cancer faced treatment choice for two

When Linsey Sowinski was told about the aggressive tumor growing inside her chest, she was scared about more than just the cancer. She was three months pregnant and she worried that doctors were going to give her a wrenching choice: risk her own life by delaying treatment until her baby was born or terminate the pregnancy and start chemotherapy right now.
But these days, increasingly, cancer stricken mothers-to-be are being told that there might be a third choice. Doctors have learned that it’s possible to keep going with a pregnancy and time the chemotherapy so it does the least amount of damage to the growing fetus.
That may be the best news possible for the 1 in 1,000 pregnant women who are diagnosed with cancer each year.
For Sowinski the strategy seems to have paid off.  Her cancer is in remission and her baby girl Lena Kate, born by C-section in May, seems to be perfectly healthy even though she spent several nerve wracking months with a depressed immune system.

Cancer vaccine success

Implant-based cancer vaccine is first to eliminate tumors in mice

Omar Ali/Harvard University

A polymer implant, 8.5 mm in diameter, is embedded with chemical signals that encourage immune cells to attack tumors.

A cancer vaccine carried into the body on a carefully engineered, fingernail-sized implant is the first to successfully eliminate tumors in mammals, scientists report this week (Nov. 25) in the journal Science Translational Medicine.