Family of melanoma patient featured on "Extreme Makeover"

Starting this weekend, the crew from ABC's popular "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" show will be building a new home for the family of a Wisconsin man who died from melanoma last month. The show is expected to air in either late November or early December.

From the Sheboygan Press:

A crew from the program rolled into town to build a new home for the Christine Koepke family of Dundee. Koepke, 41, mother of four, is the widow of Matt Koepke.

Matt Koepke died in August at the age of 41 from metastatic melanoma, a rare, aggressive form of cancer.

The construction marathon begins at 8 a.m. Sunday when thousands of people charge the home, led by "Extreme Makeover" host Ty Pennington. The house is slated for demolition at noon Sunday and it will take a week to rebuild the home.

From the Journal Times' Racine Report:

At 8 a.m. Friday, the show’s representatives knocked on the door of the Koepke family in Dundee, about 15 miles north of West Bend. The family was devastated recently by the brain cancer death, on Aug. 21, of Matt Koepke, husband of Christine and father of four children.
According to the TV show’s producers, Koepke’s last wish was to take care of all their home’s needed repairs.

Instead, next Friday the family should be returning to their new, fully furnished, 4,500-square-foot home.

“It’s a great cause,” said Carpetland’s co-owner Dave Brown, “and one of those things when it’s all done, it’ll be a heck of an accomplishment.”

From the Fond Du Lac Reporter:

Rumors have been swirling since July that the popular
ABC show was considering the Koepkes for an extreme home makeover.

The work was originally scheduled for Sept. 6, but moved up to August when Matt Koepke’s condition took a turn for the worse.

Koepke died Aug. 24, prompting the show to postpone its construction schedule.

While he was confident the project would take place, Buechel said the show’s representatives said the project would be pulled at any time if media published anything about the project prior to today.

Mark Origer is alive

One of the recipients of the recent gene therapy trials is briefly profiled in a UK newspaper this morning.

From today's Telegraph.

When Mark Origer watched his daughter take her marriage vows last year, he knew he had a lot to be thankful for. The 53-year-old had been fighting melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer for five years. He had tried surgery, drugs and an experimental vaccine in his fight against the cancer – all without success.

Yet Origer not only made it to his daughter's wedding but is alive and well today thanks to a trial that used genetically modified versions of his own cells. Just a month after the treatment, his tumours had shrunk in half. Of the 17 patients who underwent the trial, Origer was one of two who responded to the treatment.

Their remarkable recovery has been hailed as the surest sign yet that gene therapy is making a comeback after a series of setbacks during the late 1990s that left scientists and investors seriously dis-illusioned.

Read the rest of the story.

Gene Therapy

"Bad Medicine" author Christopher Wanjek wrote in his weekly column about the recent research which showed that genetic theraphy can shrink tumours.

From his "Bad Medicine" column at Health SciTech ("Exciting New Cancer Treatments Emerge Amid Persistent Myths") :

...as reported in the journal Science on Aug. 31, scientists at the National Cancer Institute used gene therapy for the first time to completely cure two patients with an advanced and deadly skin cancer called melanoma.

In the journal Nature on Sept. 6, three science teams reported a major link between tumor suppression and stem cell division. And on the same day in the journal Cancer, doctors announced the continued, dramatic decline in cancer deaths, which began in the early 1990s.

These studies follow separate statements from the World Health Organization and the American Cancer Society that over half of all cancers are preventable.

Will there ever be a cure for cancer? Likely not, which is why all so-called cancer cures hawked on the Internet are at best naive and at worse criminal, relying on fear and myth to generate sales.

Wanjeck goes on to write about the myths surrounding cancer in general. I encourage you to read the entire column.