One of the first British patients to receive a revolutionary immunotherapy treatment has said that the drug has his cancer “on the run”.
Mike Simpson, 62, is among the first wave of NHS patients to benefit from Car-T cell therapy, which uses genetic engineering to reprogramme the body’s own immune cells to fight cancer.
He was diagnosed with a blood cancer in 2015 and told that he had less than two years to live at the end of 2018. After the new treatment, however, which began in February, he told the BBC that he was optimistic that he would beat it.
“If this treatment wasn’t offered to me, I’d be saying goodbye in a relatively short period of time,” he said, after tests showed the