So I was diagnosed Halloween on Halloween of 2011 with a stage 1 B2 cervical cancer.
I went through the standard course of treatment. After I completed
treatment I had clean scans, so there was no tumor my tumor had shrunk and was not
detectable on the scan. Three months later
started having terrible pelvic abdominal pain, went to the doctor and found I
still did have cancer cells that were active. I said so what treatment is
available and he said there's no chemo there's no radiation there's no surgery
for you at this point he said, but if there is an immunotherapy trial, I'll
look and see, that would be your outside chance. I said what's immunotherapy
I've never heard of it. That was in July of 2012 he contacted Dr. Hinrichs at NIH
and found out that he had just started a clinical trial for HPV caused
cancers three months previous.
My main focus is clinical research, so all of my patients are on clinical trials.
I see the patients and take care of them on a
day-to-day basis just like other doctors. What's different is we're not
treating them with a standard medicine that's already been developed.
We are working with them to develop new medicines for the future, and
she enrolled on a new clinical trial that we had that was a cellular immunotherapy.
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment where we use the patient's own
immune system to fight the cancer. The main type of immunotherapy that we're
focused on is called adoptive t-cell transfer. T-cells are the immune cells in
your body that are able to specifically attack tumor cells they're also the same
cells that protect you from viruses. We take T-cells from patients we actually
grow them up into large numbers in the laboratory and then give them back to
the patients to fight their cancers.
I felt like a partner of theirs, it wasn't like a patient being treated.
It was really more like you know here's what
we're gonna do explaining every step in the process, helping me to feel
comfortable and then also becoming like personally involved because Dr. Hinrichs
he can't leave his lab I guess for two days straight so a lot of Saturday's
he's in the lab you know working with his cells tweaking his cells whatever it
is he does in there and he would come by the hospital and
see all of his patients on Saturdays before he left so he'd go visit his
patient cells and then he would go visit his patients. So I thought that was
really you know just that they did treat me like a partner or not like a thing to
be studied. So I got into the trial was treated in March of 2013 and was to one
of the two patients in that trial out of 16 patients that they treated who had it
work and all my tumors disappeared within two months. I had dozens of
measurable tumors liver, bladder, kidney, pelvis, lymph nodes, all cancerous and
in two months all clean on the scan. So here I am.
It's been about five years now that she has been cancer-free.
So of course the treatment really benefited her, but it's also been very valuable for our research.
Many of the t-cells that we gave her were targeting a tumor antigen that we hadn't
previously been interested in. A tumor antigen is just a protein in the tumor
that the t-cells are able to target. We've been able to capture the gene
sequence for the genes that were letting her t-cells target this antigen
and we can transfer that gene sequence into anybody's cells and make it so that
anybody's cells can target that antigen. So this is the basis for a new treatment
that we're developing in the laboratory it was all possible because of Sue's
participation in the research.
That was really whole reason I wanted to do a clinical trial. There wasn't it much chance
of my treatment working for me. I ended up getting lucky and it did, but really it was more about
how can I help science, how can I help the next person who ends up here.
For me, hope was a really important thing, and that this trial actually did offer a
tiny glimmer of hope for me and to be able to hold on to that
and let that empower me and kind of carry me through that was important
there's so much that kind of sorry there's so much that kind of takes away
from your hope when you're sick and so just having a little glimmer of hope and
being able to hold on to that is really important.
I think it's important that we try to develop the medicine for the future the NIH Clinical Center is entirely
dedicated to research it has a fantastic research community of other researchers
with the ability for us to all work together to make advances that we
couldn't make if we were all separate.