Kelly Spill didn’t cry when she was diagnosed with stage III rectal cancer at age 28.
She held her emotions together when her surgeon told her that she might not be able to carry another baby — treatment with radiation can significantly affect fertility — and that she might need to have a colostomy bag attached to her to collect her bodily waste after surgery.
“I didn’t cry at both of those,” said Spill, who at the time was newly engaged and just months postpartum.
“But then I asked [the doctor], ‘Would I still be able to go to Switzerland this summer to get married?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, absolutely not.’ And that’s what really broke me,” she said. “It really hit reality for me that my life has now completely changed.”
After welcoming son Jayce into the world, she and her fiancé had planned to elope to Switzerland. But after her cancer diagnosis, they opted for a quick, local winter wedding instead.
Now, five years later, not only has Spill carried another baby – giving Jayce a younger sister named Mya – she and her husband are expecting their third child together.
Spill, who has no family history of colorectal cancer, was among more than 100 adults in the United States who completed cancer treatment in a new study using only the immunotherapy drug dostarlimab, and she said the experience changed her life.
When Spill was diagnosed in 2020, her treatment plan recommended harsh chemotherapy drugs, radiation therapy and invasive surgery. But just before she was about to schedule her first chemotherapy appointment, she was given the opportunity to participate in the new study. When she realized that the approach using only dostarlimab would be less harsh on her body, she quickly signed up.
Immunotherapy is a form of cancer treatment that harnesses a person’s own immune system to target and fight the disease. Dostarlimab, developed by the pharmaceutical company GSK and sold under the brand name Jemperli, has been found in previous research to make solid tumors essentially disappear among people with rectal cancer. Last year, the US Food and Drug Administration designated dostarlimab to be a “breakthrough therapy” for the treatment of certain rectal cancers.
But the new study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that the immunotherapy treatment worked against not only advanced rectal cancer but other cancer types too, allowing patients to avoid surgery and other types of more invasive treatment to cure their disease.
Spill received 30-minute intravenous infusions of dostarlimab at a medical facility every three weeks and said she had no adverse side effects.
“It took four treatments until I found out that the tumor was halfway gone, and then by my ninth treatment, the tumor had completely disappeared. And I was then told I was cancer-free at that point,” Spill said.
“I then was told I did not have to go through radiation, I did not have to go through surgery, and that was like one of the best days of my life, because I knew that I can then proceed with having a baby,” she said. “This clinical trial has completely changed what my life could have looked like … and it’s like a miracle.”