How Immunotherapy Offered a New Lease on Life
“I was one of those people who never gets sick,” she remembers.
But one day in the spring of 2017, Hope Hughes noticed a spot of blood in her urine. The busy 64-year-old, who worked as a management consulting executive in Manhattan, mentioned it two weeks later during a routine checkup with her OB-GYN, who ordered an ultrasound. The radiologist, looking over the ultrasound images, noticed something suspicious: a mass in Hughes’s bladder.
Hughes’s primary care physician, a graduate of Weill Cornell Medicine, referred her to the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. There, CT scans and other tests confirmed stage 3 bladder cancer, including some spread to local lymph nodes. With the traditional treatment, surgery plus chemotherapy, the five-year survival rate for bladder cancer this advanced was well below 50 percent.
Read more about how immunotherapy offered Hughes a new lease on life in Weill Cornell Medicine's magazine, IMPACT.
