I started finding more long-term survivors. This was probably the biggest change in my thinking.@ThomasOwenMcCa1 wasn’t alone. Brad Silver received DCVax-L in one of the earliest trials after being diagnosed with GBM in his early 30s. He’s now a 23-year survivor. Jamil Newirth was diagnosed at 32 and given approximately 17 months to live. He received UCLA’s personalized dendritic-cell vaccine and was profiled by UCLA more than a decade later, alive and thriving. Sarah Rigby was diagnosed with GBM in 2011 and has been documented more than 15 years later as a long-term DCVax patient. Nigel French was diagnosed with GBM in 2015, entered the DCVax-L trial at King’s College Hospital and was subsequently documented in long-term remission. Kat Charles was diagnosed with grade 4 GBM in 2013 and at one point was told she had only three months to live. She later obtained a personalized dendritic-cell vaccine and continued receiving maintenance booster injections. More than a decade later, hers remains an extraordinary long-term-survivor story. And I found other early UCLA dendritic-cell-vaccine survivors, including Jennifer Sugioka, Elijah Luyten and Gallia Kistler. Suddenly Thomas didn’t look like one isolated anomaly anymore. I was finding a group of people who had received this type of dendritic-cell vaccine and experienced extraordinary survival — 10 years, 12 years, 20-plus years — including patients with many years without recurrence. And there is something especially important about these early survivors: Many of them didn’t receive Hiltonol. Some were treated years before the later UCLA study combining dendritic-cell vaccination with poly-ICLC. In other words, the extraordinary long-term survivors already existed before these newer combinations were being used. And that made the newer research even more exciting to me. If some patients became 10-, 15- and even 20-plus-year survivors with the earlier vaccine approaches, what might be possible if researchers can now strengthen that immune response even further? That’s the question that gives me hope. Then came Marnix Bosch’s July 3, 2026 presentation. At the British Neuro-Oncology Society meeting, Bosch presented new analyses using individual-patient data that hadn’t been available for the original Phase III analysis. Researchers were now able to match DCVax patients much more precisely with patients from three randomized GBM trials based on important prognostic characteristics. Across several propensity-score-matching approaches, the estimated survival advantage associated with DCVax-L was 3.4 to 6.3 months, rather than the original 2.8 months. Other statistical approaches produced similar results. Their overall conclusion was that the original analysis had likely underestimated the survival benefit associated with DCVax-L. Was that encouraging to me? Absolutely. But I want to be honest: an extra handful of months still isn’t what gives me hope. Whether the median advantage is three months or six months, I don’t want six extra months for my daughter. I want her to live a long, full life. What the newer analysis did was strengthen my confidence that DCVax has a real treatment effect and that its original benefit may have been underestimated. But my hope comes from the long tail. At five years, 13% of newly diagnosed GBM patients receiving DCVax were alive compared with 5.7% of the external controls — more than double. And now I know of some of the people represented by that tail. Brad. Thomas. Jamil. Sarah. Nigel. Kat. Jennifer. Elijah. Gallia. Those are the people I think about.