- My name is Doug Olson. I'm 66 years old.
My story started over 17 years ago.
I was diagnosed with cancer in 1996,
chronic lymphocytic leukemia, to be exact.
It wasn't an if.
It was, at some point, I wasn't going to make it.
I had a wife and four kids,
and needless to say, I was terrified.
And my last round of chemotherapy
put me in partial remission, but by that time,
40% of my bone marrow was actually cancer cells.
So, it was at that point that Dr. Porter sat me down.
He said, "Doug, it's time to consider
a bone marrow transplant,
something I've been trying to avoid for a long time."
But then he also said, he said, "You know,
there's a new clinical trial we're just starting,"
and he talked to me about this new therapy
that would use my own white cells
to kill the cancer cells,
and that he thought I would be a good candidate for it.
I agreed to be in the trial.
In fact, I was excited to be in the trial
because it was like there actually was hope,
that there was a way for me to fight this thing.
That before, there just wasn't.
This was something that could be a cure.
The infusion took less than 5 minutes.
They watched me for another couple of hours
and then sent me home with my wife.
But almost two weeks to the hour,
I woke up on a Monday morning, and I had chills and a fever,
and I actually was kind of excited
because I felt something was working.
I sent Dr. Porter a note,
and he said, "You need to come in."
And the next day, I woke up, I was feeling pretty good.
It was either that day or the next,
Dr. Porter walked into my hospital room
and he was holding his cell phone
and looking at it.
And he said, "Hot off the press."
He said, "Doug, it's working."
I was discharged from the hospital on Friday.
My wife picked me up and we drove straight
to the Annapolis Boat Show and bought a sailboat.
A little 18-foot Daysailor.
I decided that my grandkids need to learn how to sail.
It was less than a month from when I got my first infusion
of these T cells,
and I was already thinking about the future.
A week later, I was in Dr. Porter's office
in one of the exam rooms
and we were sitting there looking at each other,
and he sort of leaned forward and he put his hand at my knee,
and he said, "Doug, we can't find a single cancer cell
anywhere in your body.
Not in your bone marrow, not in your blood.
Your lymph nodes are shrinking" and he said, "It's working."
We just both sat there looking at each other,
and he had tears in his eyes, and so did I.
It had been a long, long time
since I actually could think about there being a future
without the knowledge that something that was inside me
was eventually going to take my life.
I'm very healthy, and still cancer-free.
It's just something that's almost impossible
to get your head around,
that you were lucky enough to be a patient at Penn
where this research was going on,
and this discovery of using the patient's own immune system
to fight cancer,
it's amazing to be a part of it.