Therapeutic Vaccines: A New Revolution

The earliest days of medicines had our ancestors using drugs derived from bark, leaves, stems and other parts of naturally occurring plants. Then in the late 19th century came the heyday of synthetic, organic chemistry which produced nearly all of the "small molecule" medications that we use today. That period lasted over a century and continues today, in 2015, but there is a powerful contender becoming more prevalent, which has the potential to be the usual therapy of the future. Today, we mainly control symptoms, but do not cure diseases. Examples abound with our current leading drug therapies for diabetes, gout, hypertension, congestive heart failure, COPD, asthma, GERD, glaucoma, ulcers, arthritis and other inflammatory diseases, migraine and a huge array of others.