Cancer vaccine developed… in Cuba?!?

What a weird world we live in.

Sitting at the doorstep of the world’s largest domestic economy, yet stripped of the right to legitimate trade with that nation, Cuba has been forced to seek some products on its own.

To some countries, the products of our pharma companies are our greatest export. Unable to acquire these drugs directly from US manufacturers, Cuba has had to develop its own means of producing pharmaceutical medicine.

An interesting consequence of this has been their development of CimaVax EGF, a lung cancer vaccine that virtually eliminates the continued development of cancer cells in patients with non small cell lung cancer.

A cancer vaccine is not exactly what you would think. You might think that you’d give this to a baby to keep them from ever getting cancer. That’s not exactly correct. As I understand it, what it does is to cease the growth of existing cancer. As cancer is not an infectious disease, a vaccine against it is not designed to inhibit its contagion from person to person. Rather, what it is supposed to do is this: if you give it to someone who has lung cancer, they still have the cancer they had when you gave it to them, but the cancer stops growing.

So if you can get rid of the cancer they already have (not easy if its on their lungs) your efforts to extend their life are going to have far better results.

Pretty cool, huh?

But US citizens aren’t going to get a crack at the drug. At least not domestically. Because the drug was developed in Cuba, and because we won’t trade with Cuba, the Cuban government has no interest in seeking FDA approval of the drug. So, while countries like Peru, Japan, the UK and Canada are all currently conducting clinical trials of the drug, we are apparently pretending that this drug does not exist.

Our foreign policy is still staunchly in favor of the preservation of an endangered species: the Cold War adversary. With that mindset, this cancer vaccine somehow threaten our national security.

Hopefully it won’t be long before Fidel Castro bestows the ultimate gift to the people of Cuba. We probably won’t normalize trade with them until that happens. Unfortunately, it looks like their medical technology is pretty sophisticated, so they might wind up keeping him alive a lot longer than we thought. He’s already been in power for fifty years. He’s really giving Queen Victoria a run for her money (Queen Victoria held the throne for sixty-three years).