A Utah mother of six who was once told she might only have a few years to live is now cancer-free and helping patients around the world find life-saving treatme
A Utah mother of six who was once told she might only have a few years to live is now cancer-free and helping patients around the world find life-saving treatments with the help of artificial intelligence.
(Photo: Fifteen years after her diagnosis, Jenny Ahlstrom has transformed her experience into a mission to change the future of cancer care.“The five-year median survival was about 50%,” Ahlstrom said.“And with my disease characteristics, my myeloma genetics, my prognosis was about two years because I had a high-risk feature,” Ahlstrom said.Increased use of artificial intelligence in police work could cause problems in casesFollowing her diagnosis, Ahlstrom underwent years of aggressive treatment, including two back-to-back stem cell transplants. She traveled thousands of miles and spent months away from her family before a breakthrough came. “It's a remarkable technology that's fundamentally changed how we approach our patients,” said Dr. Douglas Sborov, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Institute. Sborov treated Ahlstrom with CAR-T cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy that re-engineers a patient’s own immune cells to attack cancer. “We infuse this drug and these cells go in and they just create havoc and they kill all the cancer,” Sborov said. “It turns out that it's a highly effective treatment. In the past, we had to treat patients basically forever. But now patients who receive CAR T and do well with CAR T, they receive one infusion of the drug until their disease progresses again.”“With that therapy, I've been in remission now for four and a half years,” she said. Now, 15 years after her diagnosis, Ahlstrom has no evidence of active cancer. She founded the HealthTree Foundation, a Utah-based nonprofit that helps cancer patients better understand their treatment options by combining patient data, education and community.The platform aggregates fragmented medical data into a single patient record, allowing both patients and researchers to better understand treatment outcomes. “When you go to the hospital, your hospital has little bits and pieces, and then another hospital has some pieces,” Ahlstrom said. “So we pull it together, tie it together, we clean it up, and then we open it up to the research community because we want to cure faster. But because you have this single patient health record, you can also see treatment benefits for you personally.” With the help of artificial intelligence, tasks that once took doctors hours can now take minutes. The platform also helps patients discover advanced treatments like CAR-T therapy that they may not otherwise learn about. “They've been able to do some things that many academic centers only dream of, which is they're able to amass data and make sense of the data,” Sborov said. Founded in 2012, two years into Ahlstrom’s cancer journey, HealthTree now supports tens of thousands of patients and integrates data from more than 4,000 hospitals, including Huntsman Cancer Institute. “Having cancer is like playing chess with your life, and you just don't want to make a wrong move,” Ahlstrom said. The platform now reaches millions worldwide and is expanding beyond blood cancers to include solid tumors, helping drive research and offering new hope to patients. “We never used to use the word 'cure,'” Sborov said. “That was something that was taboo in our field because it was so far away. But now what we're able to do is we're able to start using that word cure. The utilization of that word is actually something that is becoming realistic in a large percentage of our patients.”“I could never have imagined what we have built,” she said. “Just the creation that came out of this terrible situation, it's become a blessing instead of a curse in my life.”Parker Kingston, a former wide receiver at Brigham Young University, was scheduled to make an appearance in a St. George court today on a felony rape charge.DuA 75-year-old woman was killed and three others were taken to the hospital after a rear-end crash on State Road 201 near Magna on Sunday.The crash happened aroJerrod Calhoun has left Utah State to become the next head coach at Cincinnati.According to CBS Sports, the deal that would bring Calhoun to Cincinnati has beenA bomb threat was reported at the Flying J in Willard, according to the Willard Police Department.Willard police, the Willard Fire Department, Utah Highway PatrA man in his 40s died after Sandy police fired multiple shots during a domestic-related incident, the Sandy Police Department said.According to the department,
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