Killing
Cancer

I had an annual physical. They found something in the urine. Being that my uncle had bladder cancer, and my father had bladder cancer, and my grandfather had bladder cancer, they said we should just be careful and take a look, and they found out it was.

Our first set of doctors were taking the path that it might be better, because of my age, to just have the bladder removed.

He's engaged with his family. He's an outdoorsman. So, having a bag, or even having a neobladder we'd have to catheterize, just would be really devastating to his quality of life.

We started initially with BCG. I had some not so great responses to just BCG alone. Hated it. — He was having symptoms. He was having bleeding, and all that, of course, fed to his anxiety that maybe the cancer has come back.

I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, because I needed to find another treatment that wasn't BCG, and Anktiva became available literally the month that I was ready to start.

He was our first patient within central New York, one of the first people in the country to get the medicine commercially.

How Anktiva works is to make the tumors go from cold to hot, and then the immune system is a powerful tool to then scavenge those cancer cells and keep them at bay. And then the immune system learns from that behavior.

It gave me almost like a supercharged feeling, where I was back working out with a power. I was golfing the next day. Didn't affect any of my professional business trips.

Never had an ill side effect or complication we usually would have with BCG, and there's not been any recurrence of disease or progression of disease, and that's where we are right now.

It just forces me to find what really matters and focus on that. I've got a great family. We're active. We just try to enjoy time, honestly, together as a family. Worrying's not one of the things I want to do with my time.

I've spent my professional career getting dolled up, standing under lights, getting to know my best angles. Some call me an actress, model, TV host, writer, poet, professional nomad.

You know something is wrong, something is just not right, but I just kept going. I had the appointment, and I was the last patient of the day, and he said, 'You have multiple myeloma.' And he said, 'Whatever you do, don't Google it.' So of course, I Googled it. That was the first thing that happened when I went home, and it was terrifying.

I have cancer. I'm living with a condition called multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer, and the experts say that I am in complete remission, CR, but multiple myeloma is considered incurable. In my mind, in my heart, I believe I'm cured because I've already relapsed once, but it's not going to happen again.

It's strange because I always feel a little nervous. Sort of your future hinges on that blood test. But when I'm sitting here in the hospital is when I realize what I'm living with.

Everybody's body creates cancer cells every single day, and it just so happens that our immune system shuts it down. That's the work of the soldiers in our immune system, all the cells, the T-cells, and the NK cells, and everything like that. And then NK92 happened.

I was like, 'Oh my God, finally, science is getting behind this.' He sent me a video of cancer cells being destroyed by NK cells, and they're just picking them out.

This remission on the pills has gone beyond the expectation without the NK cells. — One of the drugs I'm on is supposed to have 25 different side effects. I don't have a single one.

I think what will probably revolutionize the care is immune treatment. There are a whole spectrum of immune treatments that you know. You have one. The field is looking at immune treatments that try to rev up someone's own NK cells. I think it's going to revolutionize treatment.

We've been waiting for the cusp of something like this. I'm sorry. It's good news. It's really good news. I feel like now finding my optimism is being validated by the science.

So today, when I put on the makeup, I always make sure, and I remind myself that I can spread my message, even if it's just showing up and looking good. Because I'm living with cancer, that's a statement in itself. That's a form of activism.

2019 is when I found out that I had lung cancer. For two and a half years, my standard of care, it worked. I got to ring the bell. I was like, 'This is done.' But unfortunately, it wasn't done.

Mid-June 2022, I went and got a CT scan. I was alone when I got my results that it was stage four. And I had like 24 tumors in my body, my left and right lung, on my thyroid, and on a rib. So, this opened up a chance for me to get into a clinical trial and do something different.

At that point, I was really, really sick. I wasn't able to walk. I couldn't breathe. I had to sit up to sleep at night because my doctor had said, 'You have six to eight weeks to live if we don't do this.' I didn't hear that.

My first CT scan was October 25th. So, Dr. Lu, he was blown away because it was 75% to 80% improved in just two months. He called me his miracle patient, and he said, 'I have never seen anything like this.' Like, 'Okay. Then let's just keep going. Let's do this.' My faith was always stronger than my fear.

But it's a tough thing to go through, chemotherapy just killing everything. After treatment, I would be in bed for a week. The positive thing was I was there with my granddaughter. She woke me up every morning to show me what she was wearing to school.

Right at the end of 2022, I just said, 'I can't do this anymore. We need to stop the chemotherapy.' In January of 2023, when I had the first treatment, when I just had the Keytruda and the N-803, I was able to eat. I wasn't weak. So, the quality of life was so much better with just the two. It's almost like I immediately felt better, and my scans were improving and improving.

I started walking. I joined a gym, enjoying my granddaughter. That fall, I ran the whole Harvest Festival. So, I was able to do life again.

My last scan that I had, it showed that there's not any tumors in my right lung, just my left lung, but the ones in my left lung have shrunk. On my thyroid, it's gone.

I've been in the entertainment industry over 35, nearly 40 years. I've toured with pretty much every major band you could think of. Met my wife while I was on U2, and yeah, I had a change in direction very quickly last year.

I actually collapsed in this living area, and because I took a fall, they did a CAT scan and said, 'Look, you have a major mass on the brain, and we need to remove it immediately.' Did an amazing job, got rid of the tumor.

My wife had already had a discussion with the doctor. Terminal disease prognosis generally isn't good. You may get 12 to 18 months if you're lucky, sort of discussion. I'm not the sort of person to just take something lying down. I'm a very positive individual.

When I got home and came across my feed, Patrick Soon with Tucker Carlson. — You need to have the natural killer cells and T cells ready. You can use the tumor in your body to act as the weapon, as the vaccine, because the tumor has molecules that is foreign to the rest of your body, and if you educate your T cells to recognize those molecules that is foreign to the rest of your body, that T cell can remember.

His methodology and the way he's approached this, for me, made the most sense. I still went through the standard regimen of chemo and radiation. I was lucky because I did start the Anktiva in December. I had an MRI scan January 13th, came back clean. Where they removed the tumor from my brain, my brain matter filled it back in. My oncologist at Cedars-Sinai said he's never seen that at that sort of level. Yeah, my last scan came back clean, so that was good.

Not getting the tumor reoccurrence is what's been my focus. This is my seventh injection now. — Yeah, today's your seventh. — So seventh injection of Anktiva.

What you get with Anktiva when you first take it is you'll just get the fatigue. For me, day six is generally the hardest time of it, but I will say day seven, I feel amazing.

The oncologist at Cedars-Sinai told me, said, 'You know what? I'm very excited that you're willing to pioneer or try these different treatments.'

2015, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Gleason 7. It was after I had COVID in 2022 that within a month, my PSA, that was in surveillance and stable for seven years, increased. It almost doubled. Later, I found out that my lymphocytes were dropping drastically at the same time that my PSA went up.

I was told that I needed to do a radical prostatectomy, and that was November of '23. After six weeks of that surgery, my cancer was back, not expressed as a tumor, but as cancerous cells that are still circulating in the area. Within three months, my PSA started increasing rapidly at about 20% a month.

They immediately recommended radiation therapy, and also hormone therapy, androgen deprivation therapy, for which I replied, 'I'm not going to do the hormone therapy, but I am okay with just doing the radiation.' I did ask, 'How about immunotherapy?' And the comment was that there was nothing really available.

I was on a Sunday praying for something that will help me to get through this, and the first thing I thought was, 'Why don't I text Patrick and ask him if he has something for me?' Within seconds, I see a reply from him, and he said, 'I do. Let's get on a Zoom call later today.'

He was very grateful that I'd called him so quickly, but I said, 'Alan, this is what I do. Patients need help. I'm there.'

They radiate the prostate bed, but they wipe out all the lymphocytes. And by the way, they don't come back for 12 months. Before you get radiation, we give you Anktiva, which would actually protect the lymphocytes or the ALC. The Anktiva was already approved for bladder cancer, but more importantly, we'd given over 8,000 doses subcutaneously. And all of this is an outpatient, two jabs.

Every oncologist had looked at just neutrophils to define when someone went on therapy, and forgot to look at the lymphocyte. Those patients who have low are more likely to not respond to their therapy, more likely to die. The bottom line is a simple test that Medicare pays about $4 for. A complete blood count with differential, which are done in automated machines in hospitals every single day, can give us a guide. But up until Anktiva, there was nothing to treat them.

My PSA at the time I received the first shot was at 0.2, and within five days at UCSD, prior to the radiation, it already dropped by 20% just from the immunotherapy. Immediately at UCSD, they started looking at me like, 'Well, this is going to be an interesting patient.' — His doctors were so incredulous. They said they'd never seen this happen.

The top doctor at University of Michigan said to me, 'Thank you.' And I was, 'Why?' And he said, 'Thank you for volunteering for something like this because you have the potential of impacting millions of lives.' That was a great motivator.

Within 10 weeks, my PSA dropped by 70%. I received another shot of the immunotherapy. Within 10 days of that shot, my PSA went to undetectable levels. And I said to Patrick, 'I'm done.'

And he said, 'No. We're going to give you two more shots because now we're building your memory T cells. These cells are going to stay in your body. If this ever comes back, they're going to remember, and they're going to kill it.' So decided to go for the memory T cells, and here I am, completely undetectable PSA.

We now have, for the first time, a treatment of the immune system, not just the disease, and the immune system takes care of that disease. That's why we saw this rapid drop in PSA.