Lee May’s friends tried to assure him he’d only broken a rib on their marathon bicycle ride. But May, saddled with bone pain and fatigue, was certain it was more. He underwent testing at UCSF Health, including a bone marrow biopsy, then left on a long-planned vacation to Venice.
“I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know what it was,” he said.
The diagnosis was indeed dire: multiple myeloma, an aggressive blood cancer that can be challenging to treat and prone to relapse. Experts gave him two to four years, at most.
That was 14 years ago.
Since then, he’s been on multiple drug cocktail regiments, undergone a stem cell transplant, and done CAR-T therapy.
“Every time I relapsed, there would be a new course of therapy, a new drug would be available,” he says. “My survival relates directly to NIH (National Institutes of Health) research and funding. If it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t be here. Science moves forward with NIH funding.”
His physician, Jeffrey Wolf, MD, a hematologist and oncologist at UCSF who specializes in blood and bone marrow cancer, has been treating myeloma his entire career. He and UCSF hematologist-oncologist Thomas Martin, MD, created the UCSF Multiple Myeloma Program, the largest of its kind in the west.
“For decades, I thought we would never make progress,” Wolf says. “It took a long time to get a handle on this disease. But what we are doing now has grown out of all our laboratory and clinical work.”
Multiple myeloma is the second most common blood cancer, and May, who was diagnosed when he was 59, had a particularly difficult form. His first treatment, a three-drug cocktail called RVD (lenalidomide, bortezomib, and dexamethasone) was in 2012, followed by a stem cell transplant later that year.
“They hoped it would give me five years, but for me it was two and a half years,” he says.
For another eight years, he went on various drug regimens to keep his cancer at bay. And then, in 2023, when he again relapsed, May underwent a form of CAR-T therapy — ciltacabtagene autoleucel, approved by the FDA in 2022 for adults with multiple myeloma whose cancer had returned or failed to respond to treatment.
This is the future: to cure cancer with a single shot. None of this could have been developed without NIH support all these years.
Jeffrey Wolf, MD
CAR-T modifies a patient’s own immune cells, priming them to attack cancer cells. May was given a single infusion then spent two weeks being monitored at the UCSF Helen Diller Medical Center at Parnassus Heights.