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>>Carl June: I mean, we made incremental -- you know, I've worked on this for about 25 years.
We first had to learn how to grow T-cells. So in the film it's not clear but the cells
were out of Emily's body for 10 days and that's during the time when they're reprogrammed
to become leukemia-specific, we say, serial killer cells, where in the movie it showed
each T-cell could kill a thousand tumor cells. So that became the idea was to make the first
self-replicating drug. So we give cells to the patient once and they last the rest of
their life, was the idea, which we know from vaccines, that can happen. If you have a good
immunization as a child you're protected the rest of your life.
And so we had a number of advances over the years to solve the different problems in growing
the T-cells and engineering them, and then, you know, we started our trial with trepidation
because it was the first time people had ever -- cancer patients had ever had an ***-engineered
cell. And the first three patients had striking
results but they had what we call -- in oncology and medicine, they had what's called on-target
toxicity. So they had -- Emma had fevers of 106 degrees
for a week, and that was what medical oncologists call -- is called shake and bake, but it was
not due to infection, it was due -- she had pounds and pounds of tumor, and the patient
you're going to meet next had five pounds of tumor that went away over a period of about
a week. And that's a violent reaction that the immune system does to get rid of this
-- the tumors. So we saw that in our first patient and we didn't know what it was until
the results came back and we couldn't find leukemia anymore, and so then we figured it
was good.