A new kind of cancer treatment is now available in Albany.
Chimeric antigen receptor t-cell, or CAR-T therapy, uses a person’s own immune cells to attack cancer.
Dean Berhaupt is the first person in the Capital Region to receive the therapy as he battles multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.
Berhaupt, who’s from the Fulton County town of Broadalbin, spoke at New York Oncology Hematology’s Cell Therapy Suite in Albany Tuesday about an hour before his treatment.
“I've been on several treatments, several rounds of stuff that worked. This worked for a while. OK, we're happy. This works for a while, and we're happy. Well, all that stuff, I've been through it, and we were running out of options. We were running down to, ‘what do we do next?’”
Berhaupt says he first found out he had cancer in 2015. 58 now, he says he was moving like someone in their 70s then. He went to go get tested because his wife’s health insurance was changing.
“I thought I had Lyme disease. I work outdoors. I work I'm outside all the time, and I've heard about Lyme disease and the way I was moving, walking sore and stiff all the time, and tired.”
He adds cancer itself wasn’t the only scary part.
“I was the kind of person [who] never went to the hospital. I was never sick, never had my blood drawn.”
But he says the point came where previous treatment wasn’t doing enough.
“I have a choice to stop it now or let it attack me. And that's why I finally put my hand up and said, I'm in. Where do I sign up?”
He says this was a long time coming.
“To get to this point. I had to do 96 hours of chemo upstairs. I'm not gonna lie, it was a tough thing. Then I went home for a couple weeks. Then I had to come back and do another 96 hours of chemo to get myself to this point where the [CAR-T] cells would work.”
Shannon Berhaupt says a lot went through her head when she found out her husband had cancer.
“Our kids, family, each other, I guess- a lot of different emotions.”
Dr. Stephen Wrzesinski is NYOH’s Director of Immunooncology and Cell Therapy. While CAR-T therapy is available in some larger, specialized facilities, such as Buffalo's Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, the new facility at Albany Medical Center signifies a new level of accessibility for CAR-T treatment.
As Wrzesinski explains, CAR-T therapy involves a genetic modification of existing immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells.
“They place a specialized catheter in to remove the blood and isolate those white blood cells. That pack of white blood cells gets sent to the company where they isolate the specific T cells, and those T cells are genetically manipulated to express the T cell receptor that recognizes the cancer protein.”
Berhaupt says he didn’t set out to become a local trendsetter in the treatment.
“I just happened to be the first one. I did it. You know, I'm doing it, if I can help anybody or tell anybody about what happened to me and how I how I've gone through this then, then I'm willing to do that.”
