Bryon Jenkin’s is one of the people we profiled in our recent 18 Month Report. The theme of the report is “Perseverance” and Byron certainly epitomizes that. This is his story.

A former Navy flight officer and accomplished athlete Byron Jenkins learned in June 2013 that he had multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer, and that it was eating through his bones. After five years of, chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, and experimental procedures, he found himself bed ridden, exhausted, barely able to move. Byron says: “I was alive, but I wasn’t living.” 

As the treatments lost their ability to hold the cancer at bay, Byron’s wife, family and close friends had made preparations for his seemingly inevitable demise. 

Then Byron took part in a CIRM-funded CAR-T clinical trial for a treatment developed by Poseida Therapeutics. The team used Byron’s own immune system cells, re-engineered in the lab, to recognize the cancer and to fight back. Within two weeks Byron was feeling so much better he was able to stop taking all of his medications. “I haven’t taken so much as an aspirin since then.”  

Two years later he is once again able to enjoy a full, active life with his family; biking, hiking and skiing with his wife and kids. He is back working full-time and only checks in with his oncologist once in a while.

Byron says despite his ordeal he never lost faith, that the love of his family helped give him the strength to continue to fight. “Hope kept me going through this long arduous process. This is the first treatment to give me a continued normal life. CAR-T was the answer to my prayers.”