In 2012, a 6-year-old girl named Emily Whitehead was battling acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), one of the most common cancers in children. Her cancer was stubborn. After 16 months of chemotherapy, the cancer still would not go into remission. There was nothing else the doctors could do, and she was sent home. She was expected to survive only a few more months. Her parents would not give up and enrolled her into a clinical trial of a new immunotherapy treatment called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy. She was the first pediatric patient in the program.
Doctors took T cells from Emily’s blood and reprogrammed them in a lab. They essentially sent her T cells to boot camp where they are trained to find cancer cells and destroy them. The reprogrammed T cells were then injected back into her body. A week into treatment, she started getting a fever, the first sign that the treatment was working and her reprogrammed T cells were fighting the cancer. But soon, she got very sick. All of the indicators suggested that she had cytokine release syndrome (CRS)—also known as the cytokine storm. This happens when cytokines are released in response to an infection but the process cannot be turned off. The cytokines continue to attract immune cells to the infection site, causing damage to the patient’s own cells and eventually resulting in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). (Learn more about the cytokine storm in this blog.)
Emily was soon on a ventilator. Tests showed that she had extremely high levels of one particular cytokine: interleukin-6 (IL-6). Desperate to keep her alive, her doctors gave her a known drug that specifically targets IL-6. The results were dramatic. After one single dose, her fever subsided within hours, and she was taken off the ventilator. On May 2nd, 2012, she woke up from an induced coma—it was her 7th birthday. Her doctors said they have never seen a patient that sick get better that quickly.
The drug that saved her life was tocilizumab.
Continue reading “Targeting IL-6: How A Drug That Helped a 6-Year-Old Beat Cancer Can Save COVID-19 Patients”
