Do you remember the column “Life, Interrupted” by cancer patient Suleika Jaouad? She was 22 when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and a rare blood disorder called myelodysplastic syndrome. With her hopes to be a war correspondent on hold (dashed?), she channelled her thoughts and fears and experiences of being a cancer patient into an award-winning series of blog posts and videos that were published by the New York Times beginning in 2012.
Her 2021 best-selling novel, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, is an intimate look at surviving cancer and “returning to life” post-cancer. It is Jaouad’s experience of being in her early 20s, with ambitious plans for her life, and then adjusting to the pain, sorrow, grief and indignities of having cancer. It is also about learning how to live again, to love again, and to see a future for herself.
When her treatments finally end, Jaouad says: “I find myself on the threshold between an old familiar state and an unknown future. Cancer no longer lives in my blood, but it lives on in other ways, dominating my identity, my relationships, my work and my thoughts.” The title of her memoir comes from something Susan Sontag wrote in her book Illness as Metaphor: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.”
Jaouad’s AML was treated with chemotherapy, a clinical trial and a bone marrow transplant. In her memoir she refers to the “poison” that caused nausea, weight loss, hair loss, infertility and early menopause – to name a few symptoms.
The toxicity of chemotherapy is well known. Here’s another patient describing the “healing poison” and recognizing it as a necessary evil: “Overall, chemotherapy is quite unpleasant, but its intentions are good. It has caused me endless suffering, but I know that it is helping me. If it had not been for chemotherapy, I would not be alive today. Though it is harmful to people now, a day might come when chemotherapy is able to target cancer cells directly and be drastically safer for the patient. Chemotherapy is a practice that needs to be respected and improved upon for future generations.” You can read the post here.
Regular readers of Signals will know that surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are not the only options for treating cancer: there is also immunotherapy. As the name implies, this is a type of treatment where the patient’s immune system fights the cancer cells. The Canadian Cancer Society describes the different types of immunotherapies and how they work.
Although immunotherapies also have side effects, for the most part they are easier to cope with. Jocelyne Cormier describes her immunotherapy clinical trial for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto in 2014, as something that saved her life, without her hair falling out and her immune system being “attacked.” In four weeks she was in remission. Watch her interview from 3:22 to 4:08.
Although Cormier doesn’t say it, she likely had a CAR T therapy. CAR T therapy begins with extracting a patient’s T cells, genetically engineering them in a lab to produce proteins on their surface called chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs, which will recognize the patient’s own tumour. The cells are “expanded” into millions of cells and then put back into the patient’s body to attack the cancer cells.
BioCanRx, Canada’s Immunotherapy Network, has created a Made-in-Canada CAR T Therapy Timeline that shows their efforts to advance this therapy in Canada. The network has funded important basic research, increased the number of early-phase CAR T clinical trials in Canada, and supported modelling to influence reimbursement and the implementation of CAR T-cell therapy.
OmniaBio Inc. is a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) building biomanufacturing capacity exclusively for cell and gene therapies. It is working with Canadian and international therapy developers seeking preclinical to commercial-scale manufacturing of these products and will be the largest CDMO in Canada focused only on cell and gene therapies. Manufacturing for immunotherapies, including CAR Ts, is one of its areas of platform expertise.
With BioCanRx, OmniaBio and other Canadian groups building our domestic strengths in delivering CAR T therapy, Canada will be in a good position to treat patients who qualify for this therapy.
Back to Jaouad’s moving and honest account of experiencing cancer. While I recommend reading Jaouad’s memoir for the patient perspective, her 2019 TED Talk offers insight into what she wrote about and how her cancer journey changed her life. You can watch it below.
Stacey Johnson
Latest posts by Stacey Johnson (see all)
- Right Turn: #pinksocks, diabetes news and other ramblings - June 24, 2025
- Right Turn: Some takeaways from Advanced Therapies Week 2025 - January 31, 2025
- Right Turn: The top 10 most-read blog posts in 2024 - January 2, 2025
Comments