In June 2012, nearly 1,000 people gathered in Emily Whitehead’s town to welcome her home from the hospital. She was seven. Not long before, her parents had been told that her leukemia had come back and that she would not survive.
Emily had acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer. At six, she had already been through more than 16 months of chemotherapy, and the cancer had outlasted all of it.
Her parents, Tom and Kari Whitehead, enrolled her in a clinical trial of CAR T cell therapy. It had never been tried in a child. Dr. Carl June led the team at the University of Pennsylvania that designed the protocol, and Emily was its first child: Patient 1. June had spent more than 20 years developing the treatment with colleagues.
What the treatment did
Killer T cells are supposed to find cancer cells by spotting markers called antigens. Emily’s could not. Scientists took her T cells out, “sent them to bootcamp” by adding a special receptor called a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, and put them back.
The side effects came as expected. Her new immune system attacked the cancer, and a high fever followed, a symptom of what doctors call a cytokine storm. Emily spent two weeks on a ventilator while her team watched over her. She woke up on her seventh birthday. Eight days later she was declared cancer-free.
Since then
The Whitehead family started a foundation in 2014 to support pediatric cancer research. Emily’s father spoke at the FDA approval hearing for the CAR T therapy, which was approved in August 2017. Her case drew national headlines and turned public attention toward immunotherapy research.
As of August 2021, more than nine years after her treatment, Emily remained cancer-free. By then the FDA had approved five CAR T cell therapies for people with blood cancer. June is now running trials to test cell therapy in more types of cancer.
Consult your doctor for medical advice.
