This is how little Mathías' cancer disappeared: from having no hope to being cured in a month

Mathías – seven years old, with a bald head and a double mask to protect himself from infections – plays with a book of stickers while his oncologist proudly shows his cell phone: “Look, you don't have to be a doctor to realize this.”

He shows a scan from the end of last December, where a black spot is clearly visible, the tumor secondary to leukemia for which all approved treatments had already been exhausted and which led him to palliative care.

In an attached image, the next test, a month later, where the stain had disappeared thanks to an experimental therapy.

Just a few years ago, this would have sounded like a miracle, and Mathias would have had no hope.

His leukemia is 15% that does not respond to chemotherapy or bone marrow transplant, which resists treatments, but increasingly sees better prospects.

thanks to the latest generation cell therapies, known as CAR-T.

But even Mathías's small body resisted them.

After a bone marrow transplant from his sister, he was later infused (inoculated) with these cells, which cause the immune system to destroy malignant cells, the cancer reappeared in the form of a solid tumor.

It is something “very rare,” in the words of Antonio Pérez, one of his oncologists, director of the

CRIS Advanced Therapies Unit of the La Paz Hospital, which has developed the experimental treatment that seems to have hit the mark thanks to the financing of this foundation focused on childhood leukemia.

The therapy he has received, also based on CAR-T, is not even approved and has been applied through what is called compassionate use, the prescription of drugs not yet approved for patients who no longer have any other hope.

It goes one step further than those normally used: to attack cancer cells they do not recognize a single molecule (CD19), but two (also CD22).

Pérez is very graphic: “Imagine that the cell is a person, the CAR-T grabs its arm to eliminate it;

This one, which we call tandem, grabs you by one arm and one ear, so you can't escape.”

In this way, furthermore, if the tumors hide one of the molecules, the therapy can continue to work.

Mathías was infused with these cells on December 29.

Within a month, his tumor disappeared.

Hospitals are an inseparable part of your life.

His parents, Yessenia Chacón and Wiston Rivas, Venezuelans, received the diagnosis in their country when the child was barely 10 months old.

He suffered from type B acute lymphoblastic leukemia, needed a bone marrow transplant and in Venezuela they couldn't do it, so they started a crowdfunding campaign

to

come to Spain.

“Family, friends and a very famous person there helped us, so we got the money and we came,” says his mother.

Mathías with two of the doctors who have treated him at the CRIS Advanced Therapies Research Unit of the La Paz Hospital: Antonio Pérez and Berta González.Santi Burgos

They left their jobs, as a firefighter and nurse, and came to Spain to treat their son.

Initially, at the Sant Joan de Deu Hospital, in Barcelona.

There they extracted the bone marrow from Paola, her sister – who was five years old and who remembers almost nothing of that – and introduced it to Mathías.

But he did not stop suffering relapses, and not even CAR-T, which improves the condition of 85% of children (of the 15% for whom the rest of the treatments have failed) managed to cure him.

“Today, at that point, there is no more.

Or palliative care, or entering a clinical trial,” Pérez summarizes.

Yessenia explains that at this time his doctors at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid, which is where he was being treated at the time, explained to him that they were going to look for alternatives: “There they decided that he was a candidate for this treatment.

They told us that things were difficult, but that we had to try, that it was possible.

And we were always very optimistic.”

The treatment is developed in a public hospital, such as La Paz, with doctors from the public system, but financed entirely with funds from the CRIS foundation against cancer, which since 2018 has invested more than 7.1 million euros in the CRIS Unit. of Advanced Therapies Research of this center, where more than 886 boys and girls with very diverse diseases and tumors have been treated.

There they have developed this treatment, which is awaiting some bureaucratic procedures to begin a clinical trial that can be used to apply it to more children and not have to resort to compassionate use.

To date, nine children have received this procedure, of which six are still alive, which are already very encouraging figures that will soon be published in a scientific journal.

The remission of Mathías' tumor has been one of them, and probably the most spectacular.

But the process does not end here.

“We know that if we stay still, cancer comes back.

Here we have an opportunity, which experience tells us is from about 100 days to four months, and in that time we must consolidate it and perform a second transplant.

To do so, there can be no illness,” explains his doctor.

Nine patients treated

There is already a date for that second transplant: February 29, at the Gregorio Marañón, where he is treated.

Mathías has started a whole series of preoperative tests to which he is already very accustomed.

“He doesn't know the severity of the disease, but he does know perfectly well what it is, and the treatments for it,” says his mother, while the boy prefers to continue playing with his sticker book rather than telling the journalist.

During these hospitalized periods, the child has not lost school time.

In Marañón, a teacher came to teach him every day.

“Everything except English, which she doesn't know,” she says before continuing with her games.

If everything goes well, after three or six months, Mathías will be able to lead a normal life.

And, hopefully, leukemia will become a distant memory.

“Those of us who have transplants, even from second transplants, when they pass the critical phase, lead a life like that of any other child their age.

Now it is estimated that there are half a million survivors in Europe who had childhood leukemia,” explains Pérez.

The doctor and his team now aspire to approve this treatment and generalize CAR-T as a first option that can avoid much more aggressive approaches: “Chemotherapy is from the last century, we are in the 21st century and this is what should be used, but there is a lack of resources.”

Privately developed CAR-Ts are extremely expensive.

The first one that Mathías received cost around half a million euros.

But initiatives like this, which develop them in public centers, drastically lower these prices.

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