Latest news with #CAR-Ttherapy
New York Times
a day ago
- Health
- New York Times
A Cutting-Edge Cancer Therapy Offers Hope for Patients With Lupus
Jennifer Le's doctor ticked through a long checklist of head-to-toe symptoms as she examined Ms. Le in a Boston clinic last month. Was she experiencing brain fog? Headaches? What about hair loss, rashes or joint pain? Ms. Le, 36, was diagnosed with lupus in 2016, just after she got married. She tried all the standard treatments, hoping that her symptoms would stabilize and she could one day get pregnant. Pregnancy wasn't possible on the medications she needed to tamp down the inflammation causing her arthritis and anemia. And it was too dangerous to try for a baby with uncontrolled lupus, a chronic disease that causes the body to attack its own healthy tissue. By last fall, Ms. Le had run out of conventional treatment options. That's when Dr. Meghan Sise, her physician, offered her a chance to participate in a clinical trial that was testing a new therapy, borrowed from the field of cancer research. 'Let's try it,' Ms. Le told Dr. Sise, who is a principal investigator on the trial. 'I have nothing to lose.' CAR T-cell therapy, a kind of 'living drug' that modifies patients' immune cells to help them attack misbehaving ones, has been used with significant success to treat some cancers, particularly of the blood. A growing body of evidence has suggested that the therapy can also treat a severe form of lupus that, at best, can be managed as a lifelong condition and, at worst, resists treatment and can lead to organ failure and death. 'It's really promising, and honestly the first therapy that we've talked about as a cure,' said Dr. Lisa Sammaritano, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery — Weill Cornell Medicine and the lead author on a set of recently updated guidelines for lupus treatment. Until now, she said, 'we haven't had a cure — we've had control.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
CBS News
a day ago
- Health
- CBS News
This 9-year-old cancer patient has relapsed 7 times, but now Alex's Lemonade Stand is helping her recover
A childhood cancer diagnosis can be unpredictable. What will the treatment be? Will it work? Will my child relapse? Ailani Myers, 9, has relapsed seven times, but her motto remains the same. "We've always said, you know, we're a family, we're a team, and we do what we have to do," Princecine Myers, Ailani's mother, said. "It means even if we don't want to do it, we still have to do it anyways," Ailani Myers said. Pretty wise words from a 9-year-old who has been through more than most adults. It all started during a visit with family in Texas. "She had a rash," Princecine Myers said. "I thought was a rash. Come to find out, it was petechiae. And, you know, they were like, 'Oh, it's just petechiae, really no big deal. But if you want to have blood work done, you need to take her to the emergency room.'" Princecine Myers' motherly instinct told her to get the bloodwork, and it showed a shocking diagnosis — leukemia. It was a rare form of leukemia: one that made Ailani high-risk. The family moved to Baltimore and started a very long journey. "So when we got to Baltimore, we did her first bone marrow transplant," Ailani's father, Kurt Myers, said. "She relapsed a year later, then she did CAR T-cell therapy for the first time, relapsed nine months later. Then we did a second bone marrow transplant, and she relapsed 60 days later. Then we did the second CAR T-cell therapy. She relapsed 60 days after that. Then we did her third CAR T-cell therapy, and I think she relapsed at nine months, and then we did her fourth CAR T-cell therapy. And they saw evidence, maybe evidence of disease, at her nine-month test." And even though that could have been a false positive, that meant another CAR T-cell treatment. That was in January, and since then, there's been no evidence of disease. Ailani's been through even more than her dad listed. She's had other treatments and was part of many clinical trials. "Everything except her first two major treatments have been clinical trials, and they've been completely foundational and critical to where we're at now and her looking as well as she looks," Kurt Myers said. And she looks beautiful. Ailani has been part of Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation's "Flashes of Hope" program. It pairs kids and families with photographers. "They've watched her grow up and memorialized so many steps along the way," Kurt Myers said. "She looked a little different on the outside, but she always had the same fierceness and drive and heart and determination, and just so sweet and kind," Princecine Myers said.
