Cancer survivor raising funds to help start trials of groundbreaking cell therapy in NZ

Acancer survivor aims to raise $1 million in less than a year to make the treatment that saved his life available in New Zealand. Auckland father-of-three David Downs was the first international patient to get the lifesaving treatment in the US earlier this year.

Now, he’s working with the Malaghan Institute to launch New Zealand’s own clinical trial as early as July next year.

Experts say making the treatment accessible in New Zealand could save more than 50 Kiwi lives a year.

“This whole area of cancer research is very new and the fact that it’s being worked on in New Zealand is [incredible],” Downs said.

Last year, the 47-year-old was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

After 12 failed rounds of chemotherapy, he was given less than a year to live as no further treatment was available in New Zealand. “It was a pretty dark time.”

Despite it all, he calls himself the “lucky one” as he now walks cancerfree, thanks to the groundbreaking CAR-T cell therapy, available only in the US and more recently Europe.

The problem was he had to travel more than 15,000km and had to raise more than $1 million to get it.

“Most people don’t get so lucky [so I feel I owe it to society to help] bring it to New Zealand so others can have that same chance of survival as I did.”

Second generation CAR-T therapies were licensed for use in the US and Europe for certain types of leukaemia and lymphoma.

New Zealand’s Malaghan Institute planned to go a step further by developing a third generation CAR-T therapy, hoped to be more effective and easier to deliver. The therapy worked by taking immune cells known as T cells out and genetically engineering them into “killer cells” before reinserting them in the blood.

Head researcher Robert Weinkove said there were about 50 New Zealanders with non-Hodgkin lymphoma who became terminal every year.

“CAR-T therapy won’t work for all of those patients but there is a lot of research suggesting the therapy could be used to treat other diseases as well as lymphoma and leukaemia.”

Weinkove said it was extremely exciting and opened the door for many more studies.

Patients are advised to talk with their doctors about their treatment options to see if they were eligible. Recruitment for the trial will be announced at a later date.