Because a butterfly flapped its wings in Santa Barbara?

A quick update on Dea’s winter adventures

In our January update we reported that Dea’s docs have been evaluating an experimental immunotherapy for solid tumors.  I quipped that dangling this news was “a bit of a teaser,” because so many details and questions were up in the air, and then I wrote “one way or another there will be interesting news over the next few weeks.” Well, these weeks have been productive, Dea was judged to be an exceptionally good candidate for the study, and a team of research-oncologists at SCCA/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has invited Dea to participate in their clinical trial.  Things are moving quickly.

Dea is preparing to move to Seattle in just a couple weeks (Feb 28) so that she can jump into this trial with two feet. If you’ve heard of CAR T-cell therapy, you might already know that this new immunotherapy has been a tremendous breakthrough in the fight against some blood cancers. But the path to deploying CAR T-cells against solid tumors has been unclear.  A few years back, a team of Massachusetts researchers found a cell-surface molecule that seems only to present itself on some tumors, and so it looks like a promising target for CAR T-cell therapies (one early news story is here).  As it turns out, Dea’s tumors are particularly well adorned with this special protein (so trendy, right?), and so she seems like a particularly good candidate to try this experimental treatment.

Can this CAR T-cell therapy help cancer patients?  Is it safe?  What’s the right dosage?  The only way humanity can ever learn answers to these questions is to undertake rigorous, thoughtful experiments.  And if this therapy has benefits, Dea will be one of the first people on earth to see them, as she will be one of the first handful of people to take this ride.  If you thought she was a pioneer before, prepare to reset your definitions.

The long and winding path to this point has been remarkable in so many ways but, the other day, Dea was marveling at the extraordinary chain of events that delivered her to the door of these researchers.  After fates sent the Perrys to Santa Barbara last winter, and her spinal damage pushed her to consider kyphoplasty, she went searching for California kypho-specialists, where she met Dr. Stuart Hutchinson (nephew of Fred Hutchinson), who encouraged her to connect with the Hutch team back in Seattle.  Then,  when she returned to the northwest last spring, she changed her care team based entirely on that advice, and it turned out that they were just (at that moment!) initiating the first trial of this very new immunotherapy.  As she recounted this string of unlikely events, someone commented that this sounded a bit like the “butterfly effect,” where a butterfly flaps its wings juuuuust so on one continent, and effects a chain reaction that produces a weather event ten thousand miles away.  This piece of mathematical “chaos theory” can apply to any sort of weather event.  Could be a sweet sunrise after a stormy night, with dreamy orange and yellows that almost seemed forgotten (just saying).

During her time in the trial, through March and April, Dea will be staying in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle (near the clinic). Coincidentally, the current meal brigade stops right on Feb 27.  If your culinary caregiving just won’t cool down in that timeframe, I noticed that we can send her credits for UberEats, which would allow her to order food from Seattle neighborhood restaurants that can deliver food right to her door!  I found this pretty straightforward by going here, and simply entering Dea’s email address as the recipient (copy/paste deamckibben@aol.com). I tested this process (with Ricky’s help) and we confirmed that it worked perfectly.

Dea P, I hope you feel the chorus of prayers flowing your way from friends and family. This time it’s mixed with gratitude for helping to advance this cutting edge science of cancer therapy, which may ultimately help any number of us!  Let’s plan to report on your science adventure here as it unfolds.

Love.