When Donald Trump unveiled a $500bn plan to spearhead a cancer vaccine, many greeted it as another of his grandiose proposals.
But not Anna Bochenski.
The 53-year-old New Yorker is one of the few people in the world who knows how life-changing the shots can be.
The administrative worker was told she had just months to live in January 2021 after her aggressive breast cancer returned and stopped responding to treatment.
After a six-year battle with the disease, which included numerous surgeries and 32 brutal rounds of radiation, the cancer had spread to her ribs and spine, where it had become virtually incurable, known as ‘metastatic’.
As a last resort, she was enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental cancer vaccine developed at the famous Mount Sinai hospital in Manhattan.
The vaccine works by melting away the primary tumor and teaches the body to hunt and kill the cells that have spread elsewhere. Within weeks, the tumors in her back and a tennis ball-sized tumor under her armpit disappeared, while a third in her chest shrunk.
Speaking to DailyMail.com this month, almost exactly four years after the vaccine, she said: ‘It saved my life. At that time, there was nothing I could do. There was nothing that could treat my cancer.’
Hundreds of experimental cancer vaccines are in production around the world, but President Trump’s newly announced artificial intelligence project could be the catalyst that finally brings these shots to the public.
LAST SHOT AT LIFE: Anna Bochenski, 53, is one of the few people in the world who knows how life-changing cancer vaccines can be
Last week, amid a flurry of executive orders, the new president announced the half-trillion-dollar project Stargate, which he described as the ‘largest AI infrastructure project in history.’
It is hoped that the project will create tens of thousands of new jobs and usher in a new technological revolution, which includes fast-tracking medical cures.
AI would be used in blood tests to scan for tiny tumor cells, which neither humans nor current lab tests are sensitive enough to detect.
Then, AI would also be used to replicate the tumor’s genetic material into an mRNA vaccine which teaches the body’s cells how to recognize and fight the cancer, similar to how the Covid vaccines work.
But Trump — who bankrolled the Modern and Pfizer Covid vaccines with government grants — faced anger among some right-wing political commentators due to the divisiveness about the Covid shots.
Ms Bochenski can sympathize with that view. ‘I know there was controversy over the mRNA vaccines in the pandemic,’ she said.
‘But, I think the cancer vaccine — I am 100 percent proof: It saves lives.’
Unfortunately, her cancer has mutated and she is still receiving chemotherapy to try and clear the remaining tumor cells.
But she still credits the vaccine with giving her a lifeline, however.
‘If it was not for the cancer vaccine we would not be talking now, I am positive,’ she said.
Ms Bochenski said her body shook violently when she first got the vaccine, but that this was a ‘good thing’ because it showed her body was responding to treatment
The vaccine therapy has four components. Firstly, four small doses of radiation over two days kill some of the tumor cells. This creates dead matter — an essential element for most vaccines. The patient is then injected with Flt3 ligand (Flt3L) to increase the number of ‘professor’ cells produced by the body and a fake virus to switch on the ‘professor’ cells. They will destroy the tumor cells and teach the T cells what to be on the lookout for. The T cells will then look for other tumor cells in the body
About 20 to 30 percent of breast cancer patients see their disease recur, scientists suggest.
The cancer jab Ms Bochenski took works slightly different from those which use mRNA tech.
Hers was injected directly into tumors, meaning only patients with external cancerous masses can currently benefit.
It contains a higher dose of a naturally occurring protein that rapidly multiplies levels of dendritic cells in the body — also known as ‘professor’ cells.
They kill the tumor and teach T cells in the body to be on the lookout for rogue cancer cells that have spread elsewhere.
In mRNA cancer vaccines, scientists take a sample from a cancer patient’s tumor and analyze its genetic code — every tumor is genetically different, which means no two cancer vaccines are the same.
They then use part of this, called RNA, to develop a bespoke vaccine for the patient in a lab. When injected, the shot will deliver the instructions for the body’s cells to produce a harmless part of the tumor, provoking a response from the immune system.
This process trains the immune system to spot this element of the cancer in the future providing protection against the disease.
The barrier to bringing the mRNA shots to the public is time and costs — they can take months to make and cost around $100,000 per shot.
It is hoped that AI could address both of these sticking points, rapidly speeding up production times and bringing down costs.
Larry Ellison, chief technology officer at computer software company Oracle, which is involved in the Trump administration joint project, said it could happen in two days.
He said at a press conference last week: ‘Once we gene sequence that cancer tumor you can then vaccinate that person, design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer and you can make that mRNA vaccine robotically using AI in about 48 hours.’
Later in the press conference, Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI which created ChatGPT, said AI will lead to the cure of diseases ‘at an unprecedented rate.’
Donald Trump is pictured above in the White House on January 20, 2025, signing executive orders
Ms Bochenski was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, and had surgery to remove the disease.
But at a scan a few weeks later, it was revealed that the cancer had returned and was growing in the lymph nodes in her chest.
She had a double-mastectomy, chemotherapy and 32 rounds of radiation to try to kill the cancer.
In 2018, a tennis ball-sized tumor appeared in her armpit, while tumors were also found in a rib on her right side and her spine which would not respond to treatment.
This was when she became one of ten patients on a clinical trial at Mount Sinai hospitals in Manhattan, New York, that was trialing a cancer vaccine.
For her treatment, she had 17 injections directly into her tumor and eight immunotherapy injections over the course of six months.
After her first injection, her body began to shake violently — which she said was concerning but a good sign because it showed her body was responding.
It worked and caused her tumors to shrink or disappear, putting her into partial remission.
