Posted by Michael Wonder on 18 Aug 2019
Cancer patient David Downs working to bring treatment that helped him to NZ
18 August 2019 - There are those people who cheerfully refer to themselves as glass half-full types – and then there is David Downs.
The joke-cracking cancer survivor is so determinedly focused on the positive, that he occupies his own category.
Now cancer-free, Downs is a walking advertisement for CAR T-cell therapy, which uses the patients' own immune cells to attack cancer cells. T-cells are extracted from the blood, genetically engineered so they will seek out and destroy cancer cells, and then injected back into the patient.
