Positivity: University of Miami student meets man who saved his life

From Miami, Florida:

Posted on Tuesday, 11.17.09

A University of Miami student battling a rare disease is in remission, thanks to a discovery made by the UM Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

This summer, Steven Guarin had accepted his fate: The rare tumors ravaging his 21-year-old body would probably kill him within weeks.

The University of Miami student twice had received aggressive, traditional cancer treatment for a rare lymphoma at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the UM Miller School of Medicine.

Both times he recovered, only to have the killer tumors return with a vengeance, covering most of his body. But today, Guarin is in total remission, thanks to a medical researcher whom Guarin met for the first time Tuesday.

“I’m thankful you dedicated your life to research,” Guarin said, shaking Eckhard Podack’s hand. “There are many to thank, but you are the first. It feels good to not be sick.”

That wasn’t the case five months ago. Guarin, the son of Colombian immigrants who live in Kendall, was too weak for more chemotherapy. His doctors feared he would die within days. His mother and aunt kept vigil by his bedside at Sylvester, praying.

“He’s the baby of the family and my only boy,” his mother, Maria, said Tuesday. “Imagine the state we were in.”

Joseph Rosenblatt, his oncologist at Sylvester, said the outlook was bleak. “We had run out of options.”

But Guarin was at an academic medical center, where physicians and researchers work together to develop and test new therapies for patients. Rosenblatt was testing a new drug to seek out and kill cancer cells — a drug that was developed in a Sylvester lab almost two decades ago.

Podack, now a distinguished Sylvester professor and chair of the department of microbiology and immunology, sold the first incarnation of the drug to Seattle Genetics Inc. in the early 1990s. The company spent years and millions of dollars testing and refining the drug, adding a powerful chemotherapy to create SGN-35.

GUIDED MISSILE

The result: a guided missile that carries chemo directly to the cancer cells, avoiding healthy tissue.

The problem was Guarin was too sick to be considered a candidate for the promising therapy.

“We had to figure out a way to get Steve into the trial, even though he did not meet the criteria. He was just too sick by then. He had a raging fever, his liver was failing and his blood count was horrible,” Rosenblatt said.

Rosenblatt convinced Seattle Genetics to accept the communications student as the first patient to enroll in the trial.

The gamble, so far, has paid off. Within two days of his first infusion, Guarin’s tumors, which were once hot and visibly growing under his skin, had vanished.

“Within a day and a half, I went from fevers and pain and lymph nodes everywhere to walking,” Guarin said. “For me, it’s a miracle drug.”

An added benefit of SGN-35: no side effects.

Guarin would soon learn that the drug that is still keeping him alive had been developed in a laboratory just a few hundred yards from his hospital bed — by a researcher who never had met a patient who his research has helped. ….

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