A young woman is expressing her gratitude for a lifesaving clinical trial, while doctors hold their breath over the potential for federal funding cuts.
After years of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, Emma Dimery is now cancer free. She was diagnosed at age 23 with stage three colorectal cancer, and it quickly progressed to stage four.
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WATCH HERE"They found a softball-sized tumor and golf ball-sized tumor," she said. "I was really treading water for like four years, doing immunotherapy every other week, waiting for a clinical trial. I had pretty much exhausted all other treatment options."
Now 36, she's sharing her story in disbelief, as no cancer has been detected in her body after years of uncertainty.
Dimery was enrolled in a clinical trial at the University of Minnesota. The immunotherapy she received essentially reprogrammed her own T cells to attack the cancer, offering a new path for patients who don't respond to existing treatment.
Her oncologist, Dr. Emil Lou, is presenting her results this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) at McCormick Place in Chicago.
"The hope is to create a new way of looking at cellular immunotherapy, and retrain the immune system to be successful against cancer," said Lou, a professor of medicine and oncology at the University of Minnesota. "No evidence of disease after two years is essentially unprecedented for people with stage four colorectal cancer."
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Rates of colorectal cancer among younger patients are rising at an alarming rate, Lou said, raising the urgency of finding treatment options for the disease as 1-in-5 cases are now being reported among adults under the age of 50.
"There are about 150,000 new cases of colorectal cancer in the US each year," Lou said.
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SIGN UP Lou and others in the field are expressing concern over the future of sustained public investment in biomedical research, the vast majority of which comes from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research in the US.
"All of the advances we’ve realized, in terms of cancer treatments and cures, and early detection, all come from that public investment," said Dr. Keith Flaherty, a medical oncologist and the president-elect for AACR.
The Trump administration has plans to potentially slash the NIH budget, which could have devastating consequences for physicians seeking new treatments.
"It's really scary to think about a 40% cut in the NIH budget," Flaherty said. "A cut of that sort would be absolutely devastating."
Thousands of NIH employees have already been laid off, with a proposed cut to the agency's funding looming.
"There’s been grants withheld and even existing grants terminated," said Flaherty. "There are people already who are redirecting their careers and leaving academic research environments as a consequence of these changes."
Early warning signs include abdominal pain, rectal bleeding, diarrhea, and iron deficiency or anemia, according to the National Cancer Institute.
As more than 20,000 doctors and scientists gather in Chicago, the impact of funding cuts is a major topic of conversation, with the overall tone of the convention turning more somber.
"The value of us gathering for the AACR annual meeting is a 'meeting of the minds.' We have scientists and oncologists like me, and everywhere in between, really getting together and incorporating people from different backgrounds to try to tackle the thousands of problems related to cancer," Lou said.
"We’re a resilient community," added Flaherty. "We have a really mixed set of emotions at this meeting, but our sense of purpose has never been stronger."
