Salon.com > Immunotherapy

My “truly remarkable” cancer breakthrough

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:45:00 +0000

I've spent my whole career trying to make some kind of a name for myself. But it turns out that if I am ever remembered for anything, it will likely be as a number.

My patient number is how I'm identified in the immunotherapy clinical trial I've been in since the fall of 2011. It protects my privacy as my doctors and researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering assess my results. And those results have been, in the words of American Society of Clinical Oncology president Dr. Sandra Swain, "very exciting." "Truly remarkable," even. Results with far-reaching implications not just for countless melanoma patients just like me, but, soon, for patients with a variety of other forms of cancer. It's a whole new era of treatment.

This is something I've known about – and lived firsthand -- for a while. But the first abstract from the report my doctor, Jedd Wolchok, will be presenting at the ASCO annual meeting starting May 31 was released Wednesday – and even in a cancer news week dominated by Angelina Jolie and prophylactic mastectomies, the findings still managed to make waves.

Cancer has a “game-changing” moment

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 21:02:00 +0000

On Monday morning, I sat in a waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, drinking a bottle of dye disguised as a room temperature, fruit-flavored drink. I was there, as I am on a regular basis, for my scans. As I waited for my name to be called, to be ushered into a room where I'd change into a seersucker robe, where I'd have a drip attached to my arm, and where I would hold very still while technicians took pictures of my insides, I read the paper. And there on the front page were two words that leapt out at me. Two words that changed my life: Immune cells.

It was a compelling, dramatic story, about a Pennsylvania girl named Emma Whitehead who'd had aggressive, treatment-resistant leukemia. Last spring, Whitehead's doctors performed an experimental treatment on her, removing millions of her T-cells and inserting new genes, using a "disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells." From there, the altered cells were returned to her body, with the hope that "if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer."