"I deeply believe I can get rid of this disease"

Gretchen Whiting died on May 12, 2009 at her parents’ home near Seattle after a four-year struggle with cancer. She is missed.

You can read more about her in the article "I think of my son" in the Fall 2009 edition of Quest.

It's warm and sunny in Seattle, that rare kind of day that lends itself to frolicking in the sun. But Gretchen Whiting has other things on her mind. In just a few days, she'll receive an infusion of 16 billion T-cells, roughly the same volume as a grande Starbucks coffee. These are not just any T-cells. They were cloned from Whiting's own cells during a 14-month period, specially chosen for their aggressive cancer-fighting prowess.

Dressed in a breezy summer top and khaki pants, Whiting sits in a shaded courtyard, the sun shining gently through a skylight several floors above. Her hair is short, still growing after her last cancer treatment about a year ago, the white shirt's collar barely covering a purple spot where collarbone meets neck. It's the only outward sign of her ongoing struggle against stage 4 melanoma, and she makes no effort to hide it.

On a day like this, it's hard for Whiting not to ponder that the very thing that sustains life can also make us very sick. But it's only a fleeting thought. Surely she spent as much time as any young girl under the hot sun, by the side of a swimming pool, and from there it's a simple task to connect such pleasures to melanoma.

It's not that she wasn't paying attention. Nearly 10 years ago, she found a suspicious mole on her right arm and had it removed. The results were negative. A second lab checked it out and came back with the same answer. Looking back, she said the technology just wasn't there to make a clear diagnosis. When she found a lump under her right arm a few years later, the results were painfully clear.

But that's all in the past. Whiting is all about the now, and the future — no matter how uncertain it might be — because it's filled with her husband, Ren, and son Jack, who turned 6 this August.

For them, and certainly for herself, Whiting has put up with grueling anti-cancer treatments in the past four years. Melanoma is a vicious skin cancer and at stage 4, it's at its worst, invading lymph nodes and finding its way deep into the human body.

In 2005, surgeons removed 39 lymph nodes from her underarm and above her collarbone. But the cancer came back a year later, and two dozen lymph nodes were removed. But after the second surgery, the cancer spread and became inoperable. Later, she took high doses of other powerful drugs that stabilized the cancer but made her so sick, she couldn't recognize herself.

"For me, there weren't a lot of options," Whiting said. "I had tried all the main treatments already, and I was at the most serious stage of the disease."

Two years ago, she was invited to participate in a clinical trial at the Hutchinson Center, where Dr. Cassian Yee has been studying the immune system and the power of T-cells to fight cancer.

Yee extracted some of Whiting's white blood cells, identified the melanoma-killing T-cells, separated them and cloned them into an army of 16 billion. And back into her body they went.

Whiting first noticed that her skin color changed rapidly, with freckles disappearing almost overnight. Yee assured her that the cloned T-cells also would attack anything resembling melanoma cells, including freckles. She became, she laughs, painfully white.

The cancer didn't vanish, but the tumors in her neck felt noticeably smaller, and even the purple spot was shrinking. A second infusion this summer included a more specialized type of cancer-fighting T-cell, she said.

"We're hoping for the best outcome, which is total eradication of the melanoma," she said. "I know that any procedure carries risk, but for me, the hope outweighs the risk."

"Life is going on, and we're living it. My son is a very happy, optimistic child. He understands what is happening with me, and he knows people are trying to make me better. Of course, he knows he has to wear sunscreen," she says, smiling.

Two years ago, before she lost her hair to chemotherapy — an obvious sign that she was battling cancer — Whiting decided to speak publicly in support of research, the need for clinical trials and the importance of early detection. Putting herself in the spotlight is not easy, but cancer has been a big part of her life, and so have the people who have helped her through it.

"What changed after I lost my hair was the looks of pity from strangers," she said. "Now, everyone knew I had cancer and figured I was facing a really tough battle. The hard part about that was I wanted to reassure everyone that I was doing fine and had a lot of hope about being cured someday."

In one of her public engagements, she talked about why she's become so open with her struggle.

"I think of early cancer detection not in terms of how it didn't work for me, but rather how it can be used to help others. I think of my son, who someday may benefit from these advances in research."

For now, it's her own T-cells that are doing the heavy work.

	2005 Patient Reunion Photo Gallery