Emily Whitehead was six years old. She was also dying of leukemia. There was nothing else doctors could do for her, so her parents took over: they found a doctor who was doing chapter-one research on experimental therapy using T-cells, sentinels of the immune system whose job is akin to Seal Team 6 – identify the target, find it, and destroy it.
Emily was dying, hopeless dying, at an age when children ordinarily lose a few teeth, not their life. Emily’s parents found Dr. Carl June, who had lost his own young wife to ovarian cancer and had been left to raise a 9-year daughter in the wake of his grief-stricken misery, so he knew what was at stake: everything.
June is a researcher stalking an entirely new way to attack cancer. He planned to take some of Emily’s T-cells, engineer them to attack her cancer cells, inject them back into her bloodstream, and see if they could conquer the leukemia that had eluded everyone else.
Emily’s parents agreed. I’m sure I would have too.
The engineered T cells worked; in fact, they worked too well. In the process of annihilating all traces of Emily’s leukemia, the engineered T-cells produced a chemical by-product (interleukin-6) that nearly killed the poor child. Emily ended up on a respirator in a pediatric Intensive Care Unit, with her family gathered at her beeping bedside in anguished expectation of her death. (I can assure you, there is no horror more exquisite than that visited upon the parents of a dying child.)
But then June remembered that when his daughter developed rheumatoid arthritis following the death of her mother, the child had been given an anti-inflammatory drug that inhibits interleukin-6. He suggested that Emily’s doctors try it on her. Why not?
It worked.
Emily is now in complete remission. At eight years old, she’s the image of what a child her age should be – pig-tailed, cute, and ready to play.
And June and others are ready to work, as hard as possible to push this Sisyphean cart, brimming with engineered T cells, over the summit and into the Valley of Cure.
Can T-cells be engineered to Seal-Team-6 solid tumors like breast cancer? We’ll see. Novartis has taken the field like defending Super Bowl champions busting through the gates of the Superdome in search of another gaudy, diamond ring. Their competitors can’t wait to take them on. The big boys, and a ban of smaller bros, are lining up, itching for a fight, with benches of patent attorneys and greedy capitalists on the sidelines talking into microphones behind cupped hands. There’s a fortune to be made, sports fans!
Meantime, the once skeptical National Cancer Institute, which turned down early grant requests for this research, is now as born again as a fallen Baptist at a summer revival, quoting from the T-cell bible as if it were received wisdom delivered into their receiving hands. Stand back, game on everywhere!
Mark my word, even if Komen has fallen off its track – another trained derailed by politics, ignorance, and vanity – the race is now back on and revved up. If this is the final leg of the race in the race for a cure, the runners are sprinting and the dust is flying.
But a word of caution, for heartbreak hill is straight ahead. Inevitably, progress runs a circuit, like a mill horse: success is followed by failure, is followed by learning, is followed by success, is followed by failure, and more learning, and this goes on until the finally sun sets on the problem. So don’t become over-heated in expectation that we’re close. Rather, allow yourself to become intelligently engaged and reasonably excited about the tremendous potential of this work, for engineering T-cells as special ops in the fight against cancer is progress worth knowing, understanding, sharing, and supporting. While the Pure Cure is prevention – my special mission – there are, nevertheless, millions of women with breast cancer in need of a cure.
Stay tuned, this may be the big one.
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