Major milestone in cancer treatment history

It has been 10 years since Emily Whitehead, a seven-year-old who was dying of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), became the world’s first paediatric patient in to receive CAR-T cell therapy, a then-experimental ‘living drug’ made from her own T cells developed by Penn Medicine.

Today, Emily and her family are celebrating a decade cancer-free and her doctors declared her “cured”. The treatment, which she received at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, worked better than anyone could have anticipated, revolutionising the landscape of cancer care for both children and adults.

In the ten years since Emily’s treatment, six CAR-T cell therapies have been approved for use by the US’s Food & Drug Administration (FDA), with two of these now approved in Australia. All of these are to treat blood cancers. The challenge is to develop effective CAR-T cell therapies to treat solid cancers.

Emily and her parents established the Emily Whitehead Foundation, which advocates for a better future for people with cancer.

IMAGE: The Whitehead family gathered with members of their Penn and CHOP team (Drs Bruce Levine, Stephan Grupp, Carl June and David Porter).