New gene therapy conquers blood cancer
When four rounds of chemotherapy failed to eradicate the cancer running through Judy Wilkins’ veins, her doctor talked her into joining a groundbreaking gene therapy trial at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, we are doing this. We are. What is it that we are going to do? I’m not going to chase cancer around your body for another year,’” the 59-year-old Salem woman told the Herald. “She said, ‘We are not leaving here today until you sign this form because I have one slot left and it’s yours.’ She made me sit in the room with her until I signed the consent form. And I did.”
Fourteen months after receiving the treatment, Wilkins’ cancer is in remission, and the FDA has greenlighted the therapy, known as Yescarta, for some adults with an aggressive blood cancer known as B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The cutting-edge genetherapy treatment involves doctors taking some of the patient’s immune cells and sending them to a center in California, where they are reprogrammed to seek and destroy cancer cells. Within a couple weeks, the cells are shipped back and injected into the patient.
Yescarta costs $373,000 in the U.S., according to Gilead Sciences, which bought the drug’s maker, Kite Pharma, for $12 billion in August. It is the second gene therapy treatment for cancer patients approved by the FDA.
Wilkins’ physician, Dr. Caron Jacobson, who is head of the Dana-Farber trial, said the approval of the drug late Wednesday has already changed how aggressive blood cancers are treated.
“It already has changed the standard of care,” Jacobson said, explaining that patients whose cancers don’t respond to chemotherapy now have more options.
“That wasn’t something we could say two days ago,” she said.
Jacobson said more research needs to be done so doctors can identify lymphoma patients for whom chemotherapy will not work so they can direct them to Yescarta before they have to endure rounds of fruitless chemotherapy. She said the revolutionary gene therapy, which appears to work best with blood cancers, could also be adapted to treat solid tumors.
“I’m hopeful this can be a technology that can span cancer types,” Jacobson said.
Wilkins, who has owned Scruples Hair Salon for 40 years, first in Winchester then in Woburn, said it took a month from the day her immune cells were injected back into her body for the hospital’s scans to show she was cancer-free, a status she still has a hard time believing.
“I get up, brush my teeth, look at myself in the mirror. My hair is back,” she said. “I still pinch myself every day.”