Has the Emperor Met His Match?

ABSTRACT

In the 2015 Ken Burns documentary, Cancer The Emperor of All Maladies, based on Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, the 2011 nonfiction award-winning biography about cancer, we are introduced to the first pediatric patient who received an experimental cellular therapy at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The outcomes for that patient, initially treated in 2012 and now almost seven years into survivorship, led to the development of clinical trials with commercially developed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell products.