This award-winning documentary chronicles the humbling journey of Carl June and his team including Stephan Grupp, David Porter, and many others at the University of Pennsylvania to develop CAR T-cell therapy which would revolutionize treatment for blood cancer.
The audience cannot help but relate to and be touched by Dr. June's humbling reflections of his own life, including his genuine, heart-wrenching emotion about his personal failures, setbacks, and losses, none more than losing his wife at a young age from ovarian cancer. When many would have quit, he kept pressing onward because his mind would not let him stop thinking about how T-cells could be engineered and programmed like soldiers (analogous to his days in the Navy) with HIV lentiviral vectors to kill cancer cells.
Juxtaposed with his journey is that of 5-year-old Emily Whitehead who had just relapsed from acute leukemia, having potentially only weeks left to live. Her parents' courage and persistence resulted in her becoming the first pediatric patient to enroll in an experimental infusion of CAR T-cells. When it caused a life-threatening complication, Dr. June's team discovered that high IL-6 levels could be causing her symptoms, ingeniously administering Tocilizumab, which provided valuable insight into cytokine release syndrome.
Today, Emily remains cancer free and is a freshman studying English at UPenn.
This is a story of bench-to-bedside and back, with so much more on the line than publications or grants. Every scientist and physician dreams about an "Aha" moment like this, and Carl June has a way of openly lending his journey to empower them to feel like they are on the same platform as him, sharing in this victory.
Dr. June humbly admitted that it took empathy and compassion, coupled with divine timing and even luck, to power these scientists to create a novel therapy that has now impacted thousands of lives with not just cancer but other diseases.
