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Feb 2, 2022 · Doug Olson is one of the two patients who have been declared cured of leukemia after receiving CAR-T cells, a revolutionary treatment that reprograms the immune system to fight cancer. Learn how he participated in the experimental trial, what he experienced and how he feels now.
Feb 2, 2022 · In 2010, doctors treated Doug Olson’s leukemia with an experimental gene therapy that transformed some of his blood cells into cancer killers. More than a decade later, there’s no sign of cancer in his body.
- lungar@ap.org
- Science And Medical Reporter
Feb 2, 2022 · Doug Olson, an early clinical trial participant for CAR T cells at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center, celebrates his 75th birthday with family after more than 10 years in remission from his leukemia. PHILADELPHIA — In the summer of 2010, Bill Ludwig and Doug Olson were battling an insidious blood cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).
Feb 2, 2022 · Doug Olson was feeling kind of tired in 1996. When a doctor examined him she frowned. “I don’t like the feel of those lymph nodes,” she said, poking his neck. She ordered a biopsy. The...
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- Tumour destroyers
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A few weeks after receiving an experimental cancer therapy that turns immune cells into tumour-killing hunters, Doug Olson’s doctor sat him down to give him news of his progress. “He said, ‘Doug, we cannot find a single cancer cell in your body,’” Olson recalls. “I was pretty convinced that I was done with cancer.”
Olson’s doctors, however, weren’t so sure. The year was 2010, and Olson was one of the first people with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia to receive the treatment, called CAR-T-cell therapy. When his doctors — including Carl June and David Porter at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia — wrote the protocol for the clinical trial that Olson was involved in, they hoped that the genetically engineered cells might survive for a month in his body. They knew that cancer research could be heartbreaking; they didn’t dare to expect a cure.
But more than ten years later, the immune cells continue to patrol Olson’s blood and he remains in remission. June is finally ready to admit what Olson suspected all along. “We can now conclude that CAR T cells can actually cure patients with leukaemia,” June told reporters at a press briefing describing results that were published in Nature on 2 February1.
CAR-T-cell therapies involve removing immune cells called T cells from a person with cancer, and genetically altering them so that they produce proteins — called chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs — that recognize cancer cells. The cells are then reinfused into the person, in the hope that they will seek out and destroy tumours.
In the years since Olson’s treatment, five CAR-T-cell therapies have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, to treat leukaemias, lymphomas and myelomas. June estimates that tens of thousands of people have received CAR-T cell treatment.
- Heidi Ledford
Feb 2, 2022 · I n 2010, Doug Olson became the second person in the world to receive CAR-T cell therapy, an experimental tactic to engineer his own immune cells to fight cancer.
Feb 2, 2022 · In 2010, doctors treated Doug Olson's leukemia with an experimental gene therapy that transformed some of his blood cells into cancer killers. More than a decade...
