Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this story, the science reporter Denise Grady provides human backstory about her article about a woman who, remarkably, recovered from colon cancer after treatment with cells from her own immune system.
I’ve been meeting more and more people with cancer lately who would be desperately ill — or worse — had they not taken matters into their own hands and found their way into clinical trials in which they received experimental treatments that put the disease in remission.
There were no guarantees. New treatments don’t always work, and experiments have risks. The patients I met are here to tell their stories because they’re among the lucky few, the successes. Still, the cancer landscape does seem to be brightening, if only just a bit, in large part thanks to immunotherapy, which includes various treatments that help the patient’s own immune system to fight cancer.
The latest good news from the cancer front came last week, from Celine Ryan, a 51-year-old woman from Rochester Hills, Mich., a suburb of Detroit. She homeschools her five children, the youngest of whom is seven years old. Ms. Ryan has colon cancer, and two years ago, doctors found that despite surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, the cancer had spread and invaded her lungs, where scans detected 10 tumors.
Ms. Ryan is an engineer and database programmer, and to her scientific mind, it seemed highly unlikely that more chemo would control the disease. Chemo made her sick the first time around, and she had every reason to belief it would do so again. She and her husband, who is also an engineer, agreed that she should forgo chemo and instead try to tap into a major research center for help.
“I remembered that I had read about another cancer patient, Melinda Bachini. It stuck in my brain,” Ms. Ryan said. “I found out about this trial she did, and I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”
A front-page article I wrote in May 2014 about Ms. Bachini, a paramedic in Billings, Mont., might have been the article that Ms. Ryan remembered. Ms. Bachini had a deadly cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, that had started in her bile duct; Ms. Bachini underwent surgery and several grueling rounds of chemo, but the cancer nontheless spread to her liver and lungs. In April 2012, her life expectancy was a matter of months. Ms. Bachini, 43 at the time, had six children and, like, Ms. Ryan, did not think further chemotherapy would help.
Instead, she combed the internet looking for clinical trials and came upon one, run by Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, at the National Cancer Institute, that made sense to her.
She was accepted into the study, and got very lucky. Dr. Rosenberg’s team found that she had a type of cancer-killing immune cell that could destroy her tumors without harming normal cells. The researchers multiplied those cells in the lab and dripped more than 100 billion of them back into her. Ms. Bachini’s tumors melted away.
Inspired by Ms. Bachini’s story, Ms. Ryan called the cancer institute. She was deferred twice because her tumors were not big enough to yield enough immune cells. But she persisted, and even sent the researchers screen shots from her scans, with measurements of tumors that she and her husband thought met the trial criteria. Eventually, she was accepted into the study and, like Ms. Bachini, was one of the fortunate ones: Now, thanks to the cell treatment and surgery, she is cancer-free.
Ms. Ryan’s case made medical history, because it was the first time researchers found cells that could attack a common cancer causing mutation — a finding that may help thousands of other patients with the same mutation.
In November 2015, after the first scan showed that her tumors had shrunk markedly, Ms. Ryan tracked down Ms. Bachini and emailed her. “Call me!” Ms. Bachini replied. Ms. Bachini and Ms. Ryan have been friends ever since and stay in touch by phone and on Facebook.
“When Celine and I connected, I was so unbelievably happy for her,” Ms. Bachini said.
They hope to meet in person, maybe by coordinating their checkups at the cancer institute. Both try to help other patients who are looking for help and considering clinical trials.
Ms. Bachini needed more treatment recently, because tumors in her lungs began to grow again. She had surgery and was given an immunotherapy drug, a type called a checkpoint inhibitor, which has begun shrinking the tumors.
“I spend a lot of time talking to patients, doing cancer advocacy stuff,” Ms. Bachini said. “It’s how I can pay it forward.”
