Happy New Year

Dear Friends

We starting our 8th year of Pennies in Action. It took me 7 years to make it to the Olympics as an athlete . I feel the same way about the timing of this ...

we observed and we learned and we are ready. 2015 will be a stellar year....!!!

Thank you so very much for your support and hope you will keep helping to move this amazing research forward.

2014 we could garner the support to open the trial for HER2 + invasive breast cancer, which is showing amazing results.

This year our goal is to extend this protocol into other breast and other cancers...

Please mark your calendars for the 8th annual Showers of Hope on April 24th 2015. !!!!!

Have a healthy and prosperous New Year 

Warm regards

Uschi

Letter from Brian Czerniecki MD PhD

Dear Friends

We just got a beautiful endorsement letter from Dr Czerniecki and his team. We can be so proud during this holiday season of what we have accomplished together !!!! But this is just the beginning. We are keeping our promise to Ursula Koldovsky PhD that we will help this over the finish line.

We hope we can count on your continued support and please tell your friends about this amazing anti cancer break thru.

With my warmest regards

Uschi

Support from Pennies-in-action

Uschi Keszler’s Pennies in Action support three clinical trials administering vaccines to patients with either early breast cancer ductal carcinoma in situ or those with invasive breast cancer that are HER-2 positive and have significant risk of recurrence. These latter two trials have enrolled 8 patients with a waiting list to start well into summer 2015. These trials will probably both complete by early 2016. Despite numerous attempts to obtain funding from Komen, the Department of Defense, Avon Foundation, NIH and numerous other funding agencies have felt these trials are not worth funding despite our significant success in early breast cancer. To date Pennies in Action raises all the funds to support these trials that today offer hope and promise to patients and families with this type of breast cancer. We have been successful in all cases in correcting a defective immune response which these patients have that prevents them from completely eliminating their cancer. We will be forever in debt to Uschi and Pennies in Action but she needs the assistance of all so that others may continue to enjoy their tomorrows with their families and loved ones. This holiday season help us to help them. Donate to Pennies in Action your donation goes directly to treating patients with breast cancer. Not only that as funds increase we can help those with melanoma, colon cancer, lung cancer, brain tumors, pancreatic cancer and prostate cancer based on the oncogene drivers that are common to all these different cancers. We wish you the very best holiday season and blessings to you and your family. We thank you for supporting our research and Pennies in Action. On behalf of the patients on these trials..

Thank you

BJC

Brian J Czerniecki, M.D., Ph.D

Rena Rowan Breast Center Program Director

Surgical Oncology Co-Director

Harrington/Rhoades Professor of Surgery

UPENN Breast Fellowship

And the whole research team

Research goes after other cancers .....

Team Czerniecki is currently working with another target protein that is over expressed in some breast,liver,lung,colon,brain,ovary,bladder,prostate cancers. It will take $ 500 000 to get the research ready to go to trial . When they have the money it would be conceivable to do it in a 6-12 months window.That is the goal we set for the end of the year !!!!! As you know time is of the essence for a cancer patient. The protocol would be the same just another target would be used. The preliminary tests are extremely promising. (Pennies in Action bought the pep tide library for this....) This is the vaccine that probably I and many other patients will need please help to give many more cancer patients and their families a Happy Thanksgiving in years to come !!!! www.passthebuck.today #Czerniecki #cancervaccine @penniesinaction.org #ultimateanticancermovement #patientsinaction

An explanation of the vaccine !!!!!

We have all been watching the news lately regarding the terrifying Ebola virus. We have seen the great suffering and death that it has caused in Africa, and we have watched helplessly as the disease has crossed the borders from one country to the next. We have even seen it vault the ocean, respecting no boundaries, political or physical, to come to America. We have all felt that sense of insecurity and dread as we have asked, “Why have we not developed a vaccine? We have eradicated smallpox, polio is almost gone, and one hardly hears of mumps, measles and rubella anymore-all thanks to vaccination. We have known of Ebola since the 1970s. Why then has no one developed a vaccine?” An effective vaccine could allow us to forever close our borders, and the borders of all nations, to this intolerable threat.

My purpose today, however, is not to discuss Ebola. Rather is it to highlight another threat; an internal threat. The disease I wish to speak of is cancer. Cancer is not an infection. Instead, cancer happens when cells from our own body begin to grow and divide out of control. First they form a tumor. But like Ebola, malignant cells also respect no borders, and they chew through surrounding normal tissues (a process called invasion), and individual cells break off to form new tumors elsewhere in the body (a process called metastasis). These growing lesions disrupt the function of vital organs, eventually leading to death. Advances in surgery, drug therapy and radiation have steadily reduced death rates for most cancers. Nonetheless, the disease remains a major health problem, and the radical surgeries, harsh chemotherapies and daunting radiation treatments make cancer one of the few remaining diseases where the therapies are feared almost more than the malady itself. Cancer survivors can never be completely free from the concern their ordeal will return. If only there were a vaccine for cancer!

Fortunately, scientists are not neglecting the vaccine approach to protect us from cancer. One physician-scientist in particular, Dr. Brian Czerniecki of the University of Pennsylvania, has had remarkable success with an early form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS. A large proportion of breast cancers produce a protein called HER-2, and this is the target of Dr. Czerniecki’s vaccine. The vaccine is provided to the cancer patient once a week for four to six weeks after which the remaining tumor is surgically removed. After treating more than 80 patients since 2004, it was found that one out of five of those vaccinated had “complete responses”, i.e. no remaining tumor was found at the time of surgery. What’s more, Dr. Czerniecki can detect long-lived immune responses in the patients up to several years after vaccination. This alone suggests the possibility of long-term protection, but even stronger evidence is that none of the patients who have had complete responses to the vaccine have ever experienced a recurrent breast cancer! When compared to other experimental cancer vaccines being tested, this approach appears to induce much higher response rates as well as longer-lasting immunity. Although the initial focus is on breast cancer, it is likely that Dr. Czerniecki’s basic platform can be adapted to other carcinomas including colorectal, prostate, some lung cancers, and others.

Dr. Czerniecki also made another surprising discovery during the course of his vaccine study. He found that healthy individuals with no history of breast cancer had relatively high proportions of T cells (a type of white blood cell of the immune system) that could specifically recognize and react to the HER-2 tumor target. Interestingly, when he examined the blood from unvaccinated DCIS patients, as well as those who had progressed to invasive breast cancer, and then to metastatic breast cancer, he observed a progressive loss of HER-2-recognizing T cells. By the time the tumors became invasive, there were almost no anti-HER-2 T cells at all! It was as though the growing tumor, through some as-yet unknown means, was disabling or eliminating the very cells of the immune system that could protect us from cancer, through their ability to recognize and kill tumor cells that produce HER-2 vaccine target.

Interestingly, however, Dr. Czerniecki found that his vaccine could restore the numbers of HER-2-reactive T cells to levels near that of individual who had never had cancer. This “immuno-restoration TM” may prove key to long-term protection from future malignancies.

These are exciting times for the development of vaccines against cancer, and more work needs to be done before we reach our goal. It is imperative that Dr. Czerniecki’s work be continued so that a safe and effective anti-cancer vaccine can be a reality. Only then can we forever close our borders to deadly cancers.

Gary K. Koski, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

Kent State University

  

Dear Friends,

We are very excited. Our tax audit showed that in 2013 

PIA raised $ 452  147.oo

general and admin expenses were % 1. 53

fundraising expenses                   %4. 29

Total expenses were %  5. 82

so what we give to furthering the research and trials is % 94. 18

Please help us with PASS THE BUCK ™ 

so far we have raised $22 632.61 plus the match we are at

                                       $ 45 265. 22

                                        ==============

We have another $ 2367. 39 that we will get a match for

Please do not let the buck stop with you.

www.passthebuck.today 

Warm regards and many Blessings

Uschi

ps. Please forward to all your friends you paid forward to so far...

Dear friends

We were able to fund this new centrifuge. 

When I asked how important this is to continue their research I got the answer.

"Uschi you are a skater right? How well do you skate without skates ????"

This is what your money funds. Anything we need to do to keep the research and development of this amazing vaccine moving

forward as fast as possible.

Please forward to your friend list of "PASS THE BUCK" . 25 patients are currently waiting for the vaccine and without the funding they cannot get it...Encourage everybody to join .

Thank you so much for all your help in this.

Warm regards and many Blessings

Uschi

 www.passthebuck.today