{"id":362,"date":"2019-07-21T09:32:33","date_gmt":"2019-07-21T09:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/clladvocates.phillipsandphillips.nz\/?p=362"},"modified":"2019-09-12T01:59:39","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T01:59:39","slug":"war-in-the-blood-review-love-hope-and-the-search-for-a-cancer-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/?p=362","title":{"rendered":"War in the Blood review \u2013 Love, hope and the search for a cancer cure"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row row_height_percent=”0″ override_padding=”yes” h_padding=”2″ top_padding=”3″ bottom_padding=”3″ overlay_alpha=”50″ gutter_size=”3″ column_width_percent=”100″ shift_y=”0″ z_index=”0″][vc_column width=”1\/1″][vc_custom_heading heading_semantic=”h1″ text_size=”h1″]War in the Blood review \u2013 Love, hope and the search for a cancer cure[\/vc_custom_heading][vc_column_text]The feature-length film about a revolutionary treatment for leukaemia did justice to the extraordinary science and the moving stories of the patients involved Martin Pule spent his childhood dismantling radios, computers and any other devices he came across, reassembling them in alternative ways and pressing them into new services. Even allowing for childish curiosity, it speaks to a different way of conceptualising the world \u2013 as a miscellany of parts, only temporarily constituted in their current forms. Most of us are just pleased to come across a device already disposed to work.<\/p>\n

War in the Blood (BBC Two) was about what happens when such a child grows up, becomes a doctor and turns that mindset towards the human body. \u201cI realised that cells are machines you might take apart, and genetic code is not really that dissimilar to computer programmes.\u201d Now at the University College London\u2019s Cancer Institute, he became a pioneer of CAR T-cell therapy. As he explains it to the viewer, with the unhurried simplicity of someone with knowledge to share and nothing to prove, this is the process of taking a leukaemia patient\u2019s or a donor\u2019s T-cells (the mainstay of our immune systems; they hunt and kill cells infected with viruses) and inserting into them a piece of DNA that teaches them to recognise cancer cells, which they would otherwise ignore, and treat them with the same lethal force they do viruses. Then they return the T-cells to the patient and \u2026 well, you hope for the best.<\/p>\n

The therapy has recently started phase-one trials \u2013 the first tests on humans. The subjects must be terminally ill patients who have run out of treatment options and are willing to undergo the intervention knowing that, of course, it may not work. So far, however, the research suggests that the approach may eventually become a cure for all cancers.<\/p>\n

The programme follows two such patients: middle-aged former military man Graham Threader, who was diagnosed with leukaemia in August 2015, and 18-year-old Mahmoud Kayiizi, who has relapsed with the same disease after several rounds of treatment and a bone marrow transplant. Mahmoud looks both younger and much older than his years. \u201cI just want to live,\u201d he says from his hospital bed with a literally bone-deep weariness. \u201cIt would be heartbreaking for my mum \u2026\u201d Graham will be treated with his brother\u2019s donated cells, Mahmoud with his own, both weaponised in Dr Pule\u2019s laboratory and administered by a team led by Dr Claire Roddie.<\/p>\n

It is a film about love, hope and the tempering of both with realism. Doctors must do it with patients, being careful neither to fan the flames of optimism with their knowledge of the studies coming out of the US (which has more data on the therapy than we do) or douse them with their appreciation of how long any path to any cure must be.<\/p>\n

At one point, Mahmoud\u2019s consultant, Dr Ben Carpenter, mentions the risk of something and his mother, Fatuma \u2013 her face bright with hope and faith \u2013 says: \u201cIt\u2019s not a risk. You are saving him.\u201d The doctor pauses, balancing duty with care, kindness with honesty, professional ethics with human impulse. \u201cThere are definite risks involved,\u201d he replies gently. \u201cBut we know the risks of not doing this are much higher.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spouses must guide spouses, as Melly does for Graham, reminding him to weigh his quality of life \u2013 and his family\u2019s life \u2013 against prolonged suffering in the name of treatment, however pioneering. Sometimes the normal dynamic reverses: patients must guide loved ones and children must do so for parents. After good initial results, Mahmoud cautioned his mother about being \u201ctoo hasty\u201d. He doesn\u2019t want her to celebrate too early. Much, much older than his years, then.<\/p>\n

At an hour and 40 minutes, it was a film that was able to do justice to all its parts. It twined them round each other immaculately, keeping the march of the days and the clinical results clear to the uninitiated viewer without losing sight of the intimacy between everyone involved, or distancing the viewers from Graham or Mahmoud\u2019s experiences, which lay at the heart of everything. It did a particularly fine job of honouring the dual perspective that exists in any clinical trial \u2013 the immediate, patient-based focus on individual treatment and outcomes by the administering doctors, and the detached, long-term view the scientists developing the treatment must take \u2013 without letting the more naturally sympathetic former outweigh or diminish the latter.
\nThere was agony and ecstasy by turns, and endless courage from Graham and Mahmoud and the people that love them. Lives and cells were taken apart and put back together in different forms. Godspeed, everyone.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The feature-length film about a revolutionary treatment for leukaemia did justice to the extraordinary science and the moving stories <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/blood-review.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=362"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":673,"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362\/revisions\/673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clladvocates.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}