Reunion videos make me cry!

First, we had Christian the Lion. It was a video that went viral on youtube a while ago. I actually watched the documentary on Animal Planet. I have it saved on my DVR. The two men that raised Christian bought him at Herrod's Department Store in London sometime in the 70's and released him into the wild in Africa after they realized that London wasn't a good place to keep a full grown lion. Someone posted the reunion video with Aerosmith's song, "Don't Want to Miss a Thing," but I've also seen it with Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" playing in the background. To see that grown lion bound toward his former owners and lick and paw at them makes me cry every time I see it.

Then today, I was introduced to Kwibi. Kwibi is a gorilla that was released into the wild at age 5. Five years later, his former owner went back to Gabon, West Africa to reunite with his dear friend. This video chronicling the reunion made me smile. What struck me was not only the fact that Kwibi responded to a call from Damian as he drifted in a boat down the river, but that he introduced Damian to his new family!

The fact two different potentially dangerous animals were able to recognize their past owners is amazing to me. To me, it clearly shows the bonds that we make with the animals in our care. I think it also demonstrates how intelligent these animals are as well.

My Work

The following is an author's commentary that I wrote in September 2009 for the website, www.MDlinx.com. It's a website for physicians and patients that is dedicated to provide users with the most recent, innovative published research on a variety of topics. I was asked to provide a brief commentary on my paper that was published in Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapeutics.

Commentary for “Concurrent vaccination with two distinct vaccine platforms targeting the same tumor antigen generates phenotypically and functionally distinct T-cell populations” by A. L. Boehm, et al. 2010. Cancer Immunol Immunother 59:397-408.

Combination therapy is not a new concept for the treatment of cancer. For years, oncologists have combined chemotherapeutic drugs, radiation, and most recently small molecule inhibitors to achieve maximum therapeutic efficacy. The first FDA-approved therapeutic cancer vaccine will be approved at the end of this year, while several other therapeutic cancer vaccines are in the late stages of development. It is foreseeable that the combination therapy trend will continue and as is the case with currently FDA-approved anti-cancer therapies, therapeutic cancer vaccines will be combined to target a single tumor-associated antigen. Our study is the first to show that two vaccine platforms targeting the same antigen can be concurrently administered due to their induction of distinct T-cell populations. Furthermore, our data show that this combination of therapeutic vaccines results in significantly increased antitumor effects in vivo, setting the stage for future studies employing combination therapy for cancer with two vaccines targeting the same tumor-associated antigen.

I would like to note that since this paper was published, the first therapeutic vaccine for cancer, Provenge, has been approved by the FDA. My work demonstrates that two vaccines can be administered at the same time without deleterious effects on the immune system. Given that Provenge may quickly become the standard of care therapy for prostate cancer, in the future, it will be important for researchers to study the combined effects of provenge with other vaccines to improve survival. My work provides evidence that this may be possible through the development of a more diverse T-cell population to target the cancer cells.