Ava Christianson was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) when she was only four years old. It was, according to her doctors, one of the most common types of leukemia and one that had a 90% chance of being completely treated with conventional chemotherapy treatment.
Her parents felt hopeful about these statistics, but after Ava’s first round of treatment, she relapsed.
And then she relapsed again.
Her doctors then suggested she undergo more serious, invasive treatment – bone marrow transplant. Ava’s younger sister would be the donor, and this treatment was known to be 80-85% successful in treating cancer.
But Ava only continued to relapse.
She’d relapsed a total of five times, and her leukemia was still very much present.
Her parents were distraught. Ava’s father cried in the shower to hide his sadness from his daughter, and her mother wondered, “Why is this happening to our child?”
At that point, they’d lost hope in looking at probabilities and simply wanted to find a method that works. “It gets to a point where you're like... "we need to figure this out" and you just keep searching and doing,” Jay, Ava’s mother, said.
It was this mentality that led the family to try an experimental leukemia treatment method: CAR T-Cell therapy. If Ava went through with this treatment, she would be the 18th live human trial of the method.
In CAR T-Cell therapy, doctors would take approximately 30 million immune cells from the patient’s body and then genetically modify them with stem cells, so they would target and attack cancer cells. The modified cells would then be re-inserted into the patient’s body.
An intense immune response was expected. This was what the doctors couldn’t guarantee in Ava.
If her body responded poorly to the modified cells, her doctors would then have to turn their attention to handling this immune response, rather than attack the cancer. If Ava’s body responded well, then there was potential for her to finally go into remission.
Ava’s parents decided to proceed with the CAR T-Cell therapy. Jay recalled watching Ava’s temperature spike to 106 degrees. When you see that temperature on the thermometer, every bone in your body says it’s wrong to let it get that high,” Bethany said. “Then suddenly it’s over.”
The treatment had worked. Ava was, after four years and five relapses, finally declared to be in remission.
Her doctors warn the family that Ava will have to be monitored for years to come, but her parents have already been trained to only be “quietly hopeful.”
We’re hoping the Christianson family will soon be able to live a normal life without worrying about Ava’s health in the years to come.
You can watch a news clip of Ava and her family here:
