She was ready to die. Now shes in remission cancer vaccines could be the next big thing in medicine

At 31, Molly Hones was preparing to die.She’d had a massive tumor removed from her liver the year prior, but was now learning the cancer had spread to her bones and into her blood.Hones had a rare cancer called fibrolamellar carcinoma that was now stage 4.After being advised that most chemotherapies wouldn’t work for her, she decided she’d rather have six to 24 months without treatment, “sailing off into the sunset, enjoying my life,” she told The Post.With a career helping children and families, Hones has long had a “deep commitment” to serving others.

So knowing it might help researchers better understand the disease, she told her doctor: “I want to donate my body to science.”If she was ready to do that, doctors asked: Why not join a trial for an experimental drug? She agreed.It’s something she now looks back on as a “moonshot.”That was April 2024.

By September of that year, five months later, she was in full remission from her cancer, and remains in remission today.It wasn’t a miracle that helped banish the cancer — it was a cancer vaccine.Unlike chemotherapy and radiation, which attack cancer directly but can damage healthy cells along the way, cancer vaccines teach the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells itself.This allows the body to fight cancer on its own, even years after treatment. “I think that this is a moment where we really could make cancer curable by using cancer vaccines in addition to other therapies,” Kristen Dahlgren, a breast cancer survivor and external affairs officer at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), told The Post.

“I think we’re about to change things profoundly for cancer patients.”For the estimated 18 million Americans who are living with or have survived cancer, the kind of lasting remission Hones experienced no longer seems so far-fetched.In August, Moderna announced that their personalized cancer vaccine for melanoma succeeded in Phase 3 trials, the final p...