Lovell overcomes

MU President speaks on sarcoma treatment, t-cell clinical trial

By Julia Abuzzahab julianna.abuzzahab@marquette.edu

After nearly a year and a half of battling sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, University President Michael Lovell recently finished immunotherapy in September and is currently going in for scans every three months.

“The treatment was actually a little harder on me than I expected,” Lovell said. “The first few weeks [of the fall semester] I was pretty weak and immunocompromised.”

Lovell’s doctors noticed a small place where his cancer was active again in September when at the time he was going in for scans, but not doing anything to actively fight the cancer after finishing chemotherapy last year.

“I can compartmentalize pretty good, but then a couple days before and you start getting anxious,” Lovell said. “Before you go into the scan, you mentally prepare yourself for the worst because you have to … you want it to be good news, but you must mentally prepare yourself for, ‘Okay I might have to have another type of therapy.’”

When Lovell heard the news that his cancer cells were active again, he was presented with a choice between doing chemotherapy again or testing a new clinical trial.

Lovell received “t-cell transfer therapy,” a form of immunotherapy where immune cells are extracted. Those cells are then grown in a lab between two to eight weeks and then are injected back into the body through a needle into the vein.

T-cell therapy can also be called adoptive cell therapy, adoptive immunotherapy or immune cell therapy.

“My feeling is, this [t-cell therapy] is the future of cancer treatments and it’s only a matter of time before it gets approved,” Lovell said.

Lovell said his response to this therapy was successful, but it also meant that he had suffered side effects from it

See LOVELL page 3