I felt the back of my neck, and there was
a little garbanzo bean-sized lump.
Come to find out, that's where the cancer
had actually first surfaced.
What was really scary about follicular lymphoma is that
there's really no cure, and that was really disturbing.
I thought to myself, "This can't be."
"There's got to be something else, and I'm gonna find it."
And that's when I discovered CAR T-Cell Therapy.
It's just taking my own T cells and re-engineering,
re-educating them to seek and destroy the cancer.
[triumphant music]
We're on camera.
Are we rolling? Yeah.
Okay, we'll stop arguing [laughs].
My name is Josh Feldman. I run a photography business
with my wife, Julie.
We just naturally can work amazingly as a team.
After we got married, Julie and I embarked
on a fifty-day honeymoon.
When I first felt that little lump on the back of my neck,
I thought that, "Oh, it's nothing."
You know, I mean, "We'll just keep an eye on it.
When we get back from the honeymoon
we'll check it out and see what it is."
So Julie and I returned home, and I immediately
went to my dermatologist.
He did the biopsy, and a few weeks later got the report,
and it came back.
Follicular lymphoma.
We had just come off the high of our lives,
and now we were going into the depths of despair.
[ocean waves crashing]
This is something that they're saying that there's
no cure for, and that it's gonna get much worse.
When you get news like that, your adrenaline just starts
pumping, and you just go into overdrive.
I started Googling oncologists...
Actually, that's how we found Dr. Timmerman.
Dr. Timmerman was on the cutting edge
of different therapies.
Okay, take a deep breath. [mumbles] Deep breath.
When I met Josh, his lymphoma was growing.
So here, Josh's tumors that are in his abdomen
showing that this cancer had spread.
He had had several rounds of chemotherapy already,
and they weren't working.
And so we wanted to try something different.
Josh never wanted us to give what was standard.
He wanted to learn what was the next thing that we were
excited about, and that was really immunotherapy.
When everything else had failed, with all the different
conventional therapies, that's when I discovered
CAR T-cell Therapy.
CAR T is a living immunotherapy that is
able to fight cancer utilizing your own cells.
So when I got the call from Dr. Timmerman
that there was an opening on the Kite
CAR T-cell trial at UCLA, I jumped on it.
So, CAR T-cell therapy stands for
Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cells.
T-cells roam around the body, and they
look for abnormal cells.
They can actually touch other cells and kill them.
Your T-cells can be engineered to do different things.
The way we make CAR T-cells is we take some blood
from the patient, isolate the T-cells,
and those T-cells are then infected with a virus
that has the genes for the Chimeric Antigen Receptor.
When the CAR T-cells are injected back into the body,
we've re-engineered them, and they will
find the cancer cells wherever they are,
and begin killing those cells.
So it's a living therapy.
Once that miracle of that genetic engineering is done,
the process is very simple and natural.
The cells are just infused back in your body
like an ordinary blood transfusion,
and then they go to work.
The CAR T right here, look, it's going in.
My re-educated, re-engineered T-cells are gonna
completely obliterate, annihilate,
this lymphoma once and for all.
So after he gets infused with the CAR T-cells,
it's all about waiting until you get the scan,
because the scan is everything.
So before Josh's treatment started, he had these
large tumors here you can see that are in yellow.
So, what we see now in this PET scan is really exciting.
This is 18 months later, and those tumors are gone,
as are those other nodules that are present here.
So there's no evidence of active cancer at this time,
and he was really completely back to normal.
There wasn't any reason for him to feel or
be reminded that he had had this cancer.
Oh my gosh, it just was the best, best feeling,
just being able to just start a whole new life.
There was no additional medication, there was no
followup drugs, there was no second doses, there
was no more chemotherapy, it was a one-time treatment
with CAR T, and that was the end of it.
[calm music]
I'm very excited for Josh and patients like him that
we've treated with these fantastic new therapies.
But despite these really exciting results,
with 40 percent of people being cancer-free, that means that
60 percent of people had their cancer come back.
So the next big challenge is really to make these remissions
last longer in a greater number of patients,
and have the immune system finish off these cancers
and to try to cure them.
We have crossed a chasm with this technology, where we
are actually understanding that the body can heal
itself with the help of this CAR T technology.
It's amazing.
[upbeat music]