When the data comes to life
Whether you call it fate, coincidence or, as multiple myeloma patient Bill Herington chooses to describe it, “divine intervention,” one thing is certain: it’s a rare day that patients and the researchers who helped develop their treatments come face to face.
In 2019, Bill’s son, Jeff, a BMS district business manager, oncology, had trained long and hard to ride in the company’s Coast to Coast for Cancer (C2C4C) cycling event to raise funds for cancer research. His father had recently completed a clinical trial for the company’s ide-cel CAR T cell therapy and had recovered with no evidence of residual disease.
(from left are Nate Martin, Bill Herington and Jeff Herington)
Training equally hard was Nate Martin, a translational research scientist working on a CAR T project at the company’s site in Seattle. As teams were being created for various legs of the ride, Nate and Jeff had been randomly assigned to the same team.
“A group of us got to talking about what we did for the company and Nate said he was working on a CAR T project,” Jeff recalled. “I told him that my dad just completed a CAR T trial, the ide-cel trial.”
Nate said it’s hard to describe the feeling when he heard that. “Ide-cel was the project I had been working on! When I realized his father was one of our patients, and that he was doing well, it was pretty special,” he said. “I was overjoyed for him and the family.”
Bill, Jeff and Nate met two days later, at the end of their leg of the ride. “Bill is the face of the work we’re doing. As a researcher, I spend all day looking at clinical data about patients but I don’t know their personal side of the story. Meeting Bill gave me a chance to see what all of that data means in real life.”
For Bill and Jeff, Nate has become family. “There’s a deep connection among the three of us that will last a long, long time,” said Bill.