In January 2025, Sheba Medical Center published the story of Lucas, a patient who had travelled from Chile. He was 19, he wanted to be a pilot or a journalist, and he had spent four years with a diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia and treatments that never quite worked. We are picking it up here because it describes a road many families in Latin America know: the one that starts when everything close to home has run out.
The family went looking for an alternative and found CAR-T therapy, inside a Sheba research programme. A CAR-T is normally made from the patient's own T cells: they are collected, modified in the laboratory to recognise the tumour, and returned to the bloodstream. He did not have enough of them. He had been through several treatments meant to lift his immune system, and his counts were still too low for a standard CAR-T.
What his medical team proposed was to make it from his mother's cells instead. Sheba describes that variant — using a donor's cells rather than the patient's own — as extremely rare, and says it was the confidence of the doctor leading the team that gave them the courage to go ahead. When the hospital published the case, Lucas was in remission. It was a case inside a research programme, not a treatment anyone can ask for.
It is worth saying what the story does not say. The hospital itself notes that this CAR-T therapy is available in only a few countries. One good outcome does not predict anybody else's, and that family decided to travel with their own doctors, after everything else had been exhausted. Anyone in a similar position needs to talk it through with theirs.
Two details in Sheba's account are not clinical and say something about the place. The friends and relatives who stayed in Chile helped raise the money for the treatment. And at the hospital, the coordinator who looked after mother and son got by on Google Translate rather than waiting for an interpreter to turn up. The advice Lucas left for anyone facing a road like his was “never give up”.
Source: Sheba Medical Center — https://www.shebaonline.org/how-lucass-mothers-cells-helped-him-win-his-battle-against-leukemia/