For 48-year old Atlanta mom, wife and dog groomer Cheri Letts, the realization she was sick came slowly.
“I was starting to feel rundown, and it seemed like I had a cold that just wasn’t going away,” Letts says.
She went to a series of health care practitioners, getting different diagnoses.
But she was growing worse, not better.
When Letts finally came here to Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute, oncologist Dr. Sagar Lonial had bad news. She has multiple myeloma, cancer of the plasma cells.
“I was expecting to get this pep talk, of, ‘We’re going to do everything we can and we’re going to fight this,” Letts says. “Instead, he said they were going to do everything they could to keep me as comfortable and happy as long as possible. And that’s when I realized how serious multiple myeloma is.”
Letts has tried every available chemotherapy, even a bone marrow transplant.
But, her cancer keeps coming back. So, this spring, when she heard about a clinical trial of an experimental “living” therapy that might harness her own immune system to fight her cancer, Letts was the first in her trial multiple myeloma is.”
Letts has tried every available chemotherapy, even a bone marrow transplant.
But, her cancer keeps coming back. So, this spring, when she heard about a clinical trial of an experimental “living” therapy that might harness her own immune system to fight her cancer, Letts was the first in her trial at Winship Cancer Institute to sign up.
was just really hoping that it would be a cure,” she says.
It’s known as CAR T-cell therapy.
“T-cells are sort of the smart cells of the immune system, if you will,” Dr. Sagar Lonial says.
In March, a sample of Letts’ white blood cells was collected and shipped to a biopharmaceutical company called Celgene.
Read more: http://www.fox5atlanta.com/health/fox-medical-team/georgia-woman-hopes-experimental-living-cancer-therapy-will-stop-her-myeloma