A Utah husband and father with leukemia is in remission following a groundbreaking procedure in which he was injected with a form of HIV.
Marshall Jensen, 30, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2012 and soon embarked on a cross-country mission with his wife and young son to find an effective treatment, RT reports.
He discovered the miracle he was looking for in Dr. Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania, where researchers have spent the past 20 years experimenting with HIV-infused white blood cells that kill cancer.
Jensen said,
We were calling it our Hail Mary pass. It felt right. … We didn’t know how we were going to get out there, what we were going to do, but it worked. By God’s grace I was able to come back.
Doctors first began exploring HIV’s effect on leukemia in 2006 thanks to Timothy Brown, an HIV-positive leukemia patient who became the first and only person to be completely cured of HIV.
Brown underwent a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation, a revolutionary procedure that put the cancer in remission and flushed the HIV from his body.
Since then, many scientific studies have been focused on better understanding the leukemia-HIV dynamic.
Dr. June and his team developed what is known as T-cell immunotherapy, where billions of T-cells are removed from the blood and implanted with a disabled version of HIV.
The HIV genetically modifies the T-cells so that they can kill cancerous cells yet stay dormant unless the cancer comes back.
Dr. June explained,
It’s a disabled virus. But it retains the one essential feature of HIV, which is the ability to insert new genes into cells.
Dr. June enlisted 30 leukemia patients including Jensen to participate in a 2012 study published last October to demonstrate the success of T-cell immunotherapy.
Six months later, 23 of the patients were still alive and, currently, 19 are still in complete remission.
Among the latter group is 7-year-old Emma Whitehead, one of the 25 study participants between the ages 5 and 22, and the first child to receive the T-cell treatment.
Jensen returned to Utah last Thursday to a homecoming celebration with some neighbors.
One neighbor remarked,
It really has been an experience that we have all been a part of, instead of just them battling it by themselves.
Dr. June is now seeing whether HIV can kill other types of cancers, according to Daily Mail, with trials for pancreatic cancer to begin this summer.
