You gave Scarlett hope
The only telltale sign of Scarlett’s nearly seven-year journey with American Family Children’s Hospital is her bald head. She’s a 9-year-old dynamo who walks through the hospital with a big smile and unexpected ease despite everything she’s experienced in her young life.
At just 2 ½ years old, Scarlett was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The specific type she has—Philadelphia chromosome B cell ALL—is a rare genetic mutation. Even with the most aggressive treatment, it was likely the cancer would return, and it did.
“This is nothing we would have planned. We’d cry—some of us more than others—but we’ve always been optimistic. If something doesn’t work, there are so many backup plans,” said Scarlett’s mom, Tami.
Scarlett is enrolled in a phase one clinical trial only offered at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and led by pediatric oncologist Christian Capitini, MD. This promising new treatment protocol involves a stem cell transplant followed by five doses of the drug Zoledronate every 28 days.
Scarlett’s father, Jordan, donated his stem cells and Scarlett spent five weeks in the hospital—two weeks preparing for transplant on April 7, 2023, and another three weeks recovering. Scarlett returns regularly to the hospital for checkups and will be followed by her care team for many years to come.
Dr. Capitini is thrilled with how Scarlett has responded to the treatment. “After two months, Scarlett was in remission not only in terms of detectable leukemia, but she also showed no detectable Philadelphia chromosome,” he said. “The medicines she had been taking before weren’t even able to do that.”
Scarlett’s clinical trial is in phase one of three. It will be years before the treatment could be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as standard treatment, but Dr. Capitini and the research team are hopeful this may be the answer for other children too.
It’s a two-hour drive to American Family Children’s Hospital for Scarlett and her family. She could have been treated closer to home, but as Tami says: “We just gravitated to Madison and never thought about going anywhere else.”
You help us discover new treatments
The pediatric cancer specialists at UW Health Kids | Carbone Cancer Center at American Family Children’s Hospital are bringing two separate scientific fields together—genomics and immunotherapy—to find cures for the most hard-to-treat cancers. Clinical trials allow us to test the latest scientific advancements in a careful way, and philanthropy allows us to move inspired ideas from the laboratory to clinical trials in humans at an accelerated pace. As one example of your impact, philanthropy funded the purchase of equipment to genetically modify a patient’s cells to recognize and fight cancer, which dramatically increases the number of life-saving cells we can generate. It is a critical step in getting us closer to opening a new clinical trial and providing hope to more children diagnosed with cancer.
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