Sam Tinaglia was just five years old when
he was diagnosed with cancer.
And at the time we had another son and a baby on the way.
I was eight weeks pregnant.
So he was not even in kindergarten yet.
Sam fought cancer with multiple treatments over 12 years.
He had chemo and even a bone marrow transplant.
The cancer came back each time.
And at this point, the doctors really
tell you, if you had a transplant that didn't work
and you've had all of this chemo,
there's a real chance that your child may not ever
get rid of the cancer.
He went in for another round of chemo,
and then, right before his junior year of high school,
his family got the devastating news.
The doctor called, and my grandma
was over and everything, right when I came home from school.
It was like a weird moment because everyone was there.
It looked like a hard time.
And then my parents told me that it
had come back for the fifth time that afternoon.
And we thought that, well, if the chemo can't do it
after three times, and a bone marrow can't do it
after one time, yeah, we thought it would never go away.
So now at this point, we thought that this might be the end.
We celebrated as a family, we traveled, and we just said,
we need to make the most of life because we really
don't know what's ahead.
Sam needed something special.
Fortunately, there was a new experimental treatment
called CAR T cell therapy.
Dr. John Cunningham worked to get Sam
into a clinical trial at Children's Hospital
of Philadelphia.
We had no hope.
But then, when we heard about CAR T, there was hope again.
What CAR T cell therapy does is it
induces the immune system to attack the leukemia cells
and kill them.
In the first part of the process,
t-cells, the workhorse of the immune system,
are collected from the patient's blood.
Then scientists insert instructions
that enable these t-cells to find specific cancer cells.
While the t-cells multiply in the lab,
the patient receives chemotherapy to reduce
the number of cancer cells.
And finally, the engineered t-cells
are returned to the patient's bloodstream,
where they seek out and kill the remaining cancer cells.
We'd been looking for a treatment
like this for over 30 years.
In fact, I came to the United States
to work on therapies like this 30 years ago.
And so it's the culmination of many people's work,
both at the University of Chicago,
the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere
that has resulted in this new therapy
that we were able to provide.
We never thought this would be possible after five times.
So the CAR T cell really did the job.
It has given Sam and his family another chance.
In fact, he's going away to college
at the University of Illinois, where
he hopes to use his love of sports to build a career.
I'm studying broadcast journalism,
looking to become a sports broadcaster for any baseball
team, football team.
I just love sports.
Sports is my life.
Susie says she is thankful for the care Sam has received
at many places, including the University of Chicago Comer
Children's Hospital.
We really needed to find a place that
had the most intense research, the most updated
studies, and the doctors who were really
on the forefront of what treatments were available.
So when we came to Comer, we knew
we were in the right place.
CAR T cell therapy has given Sam another chance
and an exciting outlook ahead, something
his family is grateful for.
We have learned to live one day at a time
and really make the most of life because we never
thought we'd have this chance with him with a future.
He has hope for a future.