After less than a year of treatment with an experimental new cancer drug, a young woman has seen her tumor vanish, along with her fears that she would never be able to carry another child.
It should have been the happiest days of Kelly Spill’s life, until shortly after she delivered her first baby she received a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
The 28-year-old from New Jersey was still recuperating in the hospital with her little boy Chase when she began to experience fatigue and bleeding, weight loss and loss of appetite.
Her doctors told her it was probably just symptoms of childbirth, but for reasons not explained in her interview with Fox, Spill said she knew it was cancer.
Stage-3 colorectal cancer was the diagnosis, a colonoscopy later revealed, but this super mom’s first fear wasn’t for her own life, that she wouldn’t be able to have another child, as she and her husband always wanted at least 3.
After looking around for hospitals, she decided to seek treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, one of the world’s leading cancer treatment centers.
But even here, she was told radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery were the treatment options, which her doctors told her would seriously jeopardize her chances of ever giving birth again, something she said was “really hard to hear at just 28 years old.”
“Radiation targeted at, or absorbed by, a woman’s reproductive organs can affect fertility, as can chemotherapy, which may cause women to lose fertility-related hormones,” Dr. Amanda Schwer, a radiation oncologist at City of Hope Cancer Center in California told Fox News Digital.
Dr. Schwer was not involved with Spill’s treatment, which considering the severity of the cancer, Spill decided to pursue regardless of her dreams of an expanded family. But luck was on her side, as just one day before she was scheduled for her first chemotherapy session, members of the SU2C Colorectal Cancer Dream Team, a research team at Memorial Sloan informed her she would be eligible for a new clinical trial to test a gentler new drug for colorectal cancer.
Called dostarlimab, if it worked as the developers believed it might, then radiation, chemotherapy, and even surgery might all be avoided.
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“All I knew at that time was that the side effects of this immunotherapy would be a lot less harsh on my body than chemotherapy, and I would have a chance of a better quality of life—and maybe even another baby,” Spill said.
All kinds of immunotherapy drugs are under development after the initial technology won a Nobel Prize more than half a decade ago, GNN has reported on several, including one that has cured several children of leukemia.
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Spill was just the fourth person to receive dostarlimab—which she took as an injection every week for six months. After her fourth treatment, Spill got the news—her tumor had shrunk to half its original size.
“By the ninth treatment, my tumor had completely disappeared, which was extremely exciting,” she said.
Having frozen an embryo in advance of the cancer treatments, Spill’s first thought was to go for number two, but followed her doctor’s advice that she should wait two years and see if the cancer returns. It didn’t.
In July of 2023, Spill gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Mya Grace. She remains cancer-free to this day.
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