Lifesaving cancer treatment out of reach for rural people

Suzanne BeHanna initially turned down an experimental but potentially lifesaving cancer treatment.

Suzanne BeHanna initially turned down an experimental but potentially lifesaving cancer treatment.

Three years ago, BeHanna, then 62, a newlywed, was sick with stage 4 lymphoma, sick from two failed rounds of chemotherapy and sick of living in a trailer park near the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. It was fall 2019, and treatment had forced her to migrate 750 miles east from rural New Mexico, where she’d settled only months before her diagnosis.

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy might have been appealing to BeHanna had it been available closer to her home. But it is offered only at major transplant hospitals.

BeHanna had been living in Houston for six months, suffering through chemotherapy that made her feel awful and didn’t stop her cancer. She wanted to go home to die, but her husband wanted her to give CAR T-cell therapy a chance if her doctor would approve it.

The therapy uses a patient’s T cells, a key part of the immune system, to fight cancer. A pioneer of the therapy, Dr. Michel Sadelain, an immunologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, describes it as “a living drug — a T cell which has been weaponized against cancer.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/lifesaving-cancer-treatment-reach-rural-people-rcna44281

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