Woman Who Underwent Groundbreaking Cancer Treatment Has Been in Remission for 18 Years

A woman who underwent a trial immunotherapy as a child for neuroblastoma — an aggressive nerve tissue tumor that occurs often in children under 5 — has since been in remission for 18 years.

Doctors believe she's the longest-surviving cancer patient to have received the therapy, which involves an infusion of modified white blood cells.

The woman was a part of a clinical trial involving 19 children that took place from 2004 to 2009, researchers wrote in Nature. For the trial, T-cells — a disease-fighting white blood cell — were genetically engineered to fight the cancer for a process called CAR T-cell therapy.

In the update, researchers noted that the children were all in various stages of neuroblastoma treatment when they underwent the trial. Five of the children had no evidence of disease during the trial but had previously been treated for the cancer and were at high risk for relapse “are disease free at their last follow-up between 10 years and 15 years after infusion.”

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Twelve of the patients died between 2 months and 7 years after the infusion, “all due to relapsed neuroblastoma.” Of the remaining 2 patients, both of whom had active disease at infusion, one went into remission for 8 years and stopped follow-up communication for the study — and the remaining woman stayed in remission for 18 years.

“It’s nice to have such long-term follow-up and to see that even if it was a very early CAR T-cell – and there’s been a lot of work to make them better – we were still able to see a clinical remission that’s been sustained for this long, so that she’s grown up and is leading a normal life,” Professor Helen Heslop, co-author of the research from Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine and the director of the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy said, according to The Guardian.

The woman is likely “the longest-surviving patient with cancer who received CAR-T therapy,” the paper notes. “Encouragingly, she has subsequently had two full-term pregnancies with normal infants.”

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The modified T-cells were still detectable in the patients — which may point to them being able to fight any recurrence of cancer.

Most neuroblastomas are diagnosed in children under 5, the Cleveland Clinic says, adding that by the time symptoms appear, the cancer has spread to other parts of the body.

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