Down But Not Out: Juno Preps For Second Round Of CAR-T Cancer War

When his second round of chemotherapy failed, physicians told Dan Symes that he had only a few more months to live. Symes, a 66-year-old former construction worker from Boston, had been diagnosed with an aggressive type of blood cancer the year before. By May 2016, he was so weak that he was unable to walk the few steps from his front door to his car.

Symes’ last hope was a therapy called CAR-T, a new kind of treatment that genetically modifies the body’s own immune cells to direct them against the hostile cancer cells. Because this treatment is not yet approved, Symes signed up for a clinical trial. Then he began to wait.

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