Brave mummy’s cancer miracle
A year after being told she wouldn’t see another Xmas, Helen is saved by pioneering cell therapy
THIS time last year Helen Hughes’ future looked bleak.
Diagnosed with incurable cancer, the 32-year-old, who has three children under five, had been told that all treatment had failed and Christmas 2019 was likely to be her last.
The teacher and her husband, Elgan, 35, spent the festive season making memory boxes and putting on a brave face for their family. But then they were offered a lifeline.
Mrs Hughes’ consultant said she qualified for a new immunotherapy treatment. Only a handful of Britons have undergone Chimeric Antigen Receptors Cell Therapy (CAR-T), which works by extracting and modifying a patient’s white blood cells to destroy the cancer.
And yesterday Mrs Hughes revealed she had been given the ‘best Christmas present ever’ after a scan revealed she was clear of the disease. ‘It sounds cheesy but it really is my Christmas miracle,’ she said. ‘ When the doctor told me all the cancer had gone I was in tears, he was in tears, the nurse was in tears.’
Mrs Hughes was expecting her
‘I can finally look forward and plan’
youngest daughter, Beca, now 21 months, when she fell ill two years ago. Initially, she put her exhaustion down to being pregnant, but, following tests, was given the news on Christmas Eve 2018 that she had a tumour.
Doctors diagnosed non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Mrs Hughes was told she would die without chemotherapy so she started treatment when she was 25 weeks pregnant. Beca was born ten weeks later.
Mrs Hughes underwent 12 rounds of chemotherapy at Glan Clwyd Hospital, near Rhyl, North Wales, but they were unsuccessful and she was referred to Manchester’s Christie Hospital for radiotherapy.
Another 21 rounds of treatment followed but she and her husband, a forensic investigator for North Wales Police, were devastated when a scan last December revealed her treatment had failed. Doctors told the couple, who married in August and also have sons, Aled, four and Tomos, two, that the cancer had spread.
Mrs Hughes, of Ruthin, North Wales, recalled: ‘They told me it could be my last Christmas.’
Then, in January, Mrs Hughes was told she qualified for the CAR-T treatment. The process, which takes around a month to complete, begins when doctors remove the white blood cells or T-cells from a patient’s blood.
They are frozen in liquid nitrogen and sent to labs in the US where they are reprogrammed so that, rather than killing bacteria and viruses, they become ‘chimeric antigen receptor Tcells’ or CAR-T cells which seek out and destroy cancer cells instead. Once enough cells have been manufactured they are shipped back to the UK and put back into the patient’s blood.
‘Only a handful of people in Britain have had the treatment,
I know I’m the first woman in Wales to be offered it,’ she added. ‘We did do some of our own research and it would have cost £500,000 just for the treatment itself in the US.’
Mrs Hughes received the cells in March, just before lockdown. She was allowed home five weeks later. Her first scan, in June, showed no change in the cancer, but the second, in September, revealed improvements. Then her final scan this month showed it had vanished.
Doctors now plan to look for a stem cell donor so Mrs Hughes can have a stem cell transplant, which will make sure the disease never returns. ‘It just means so much,’ Mrs Hughes added. ‘ I can finally look forward and plan, we have a future now.’