by Good News Network
Christmas 2025 is better and brighter for one family whose daughter is on the mend from a previously untreatable form of childhood cancer.
Christmas 2024 saw then-5-year-old Bryn Ailinger isolated in a child cancer ward, having been diagnosed with precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia which harbored a rare and aggressive mutation that rendered standard chemotherapies and surgeries ineffective.
“You think the worst immediately,” said Justin Ailinger, Bryn’s father. “I didn’t know if I was going to have a daughter by the end of the year.”
Bryn’s care team from the Roswell Park Oishei Children’s Pediatric Cancer and Blood Disorders Program then presented the family with the option of CAR T-cell cancer therapy.
Leukemia may have cost Bryn one Christmas, but thanks to this program, she gained many, many more.
“I look at her, and I see a miracle,” said Meghan Higman, MD, PhD, a pediatric oncologist at Roswell Park specializing in blood cancers. “That’s because this kid five years ago wouldn’t have been alive, and now she’s alive, thriving and just, wow!”
Dr. Higman and her Roswell Park colleagues recommend CAR T-cell therapy even for their youngest patients who can benefit—not only for its efficacy but also its safety compared to chemo.
“Chemotherapy is so toxic,” said Ajay Gupta, also a pediatric oncologist at Roswell Park. “We’re trying to make it so that patients have a better quality of life even after they’re done with treatment. And so I feel strongly that approaches that can change the immune system, like CAR T-cells, can actually do this without causing long-term side effects.”
CAR T-cell therapy involves extracting T cells, a type of immune cell, from a patient’s blood and then taking them into a specialized lab. From there, scientists engineer the cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. The cells are then duplicated by the millions and replaced in the patient’s body through an IV infusion.
The cells are processed in Roswell Park’s newly expanded Good Manufacturing Practice Engineering & Cell Manufacturing Facility (GEM), one of the largest facilities of its kind in the United States and a transformative advancement in cancer research and treatment.
“I hope for other children that have this mutation pop up that they’re able to collaborate with Dr. Higman and the others, and try these same therapies that were successful for Bryn,” Ailinger said. “I hope that she’s able to help save lives for other children as well that go through this.”
The results of CAR T-cell therapy so far have been highly promising, with acute leukemia remaining undetectable in more than 80% of patients following their treatment.
As of now, CAR T-cell therapy is FDA-approved only for certain types of blood cancer, but Roswell Park is also working to expand the use of the treatment against other cancers — from rare types like sarcoma to the second most common cancer in kids, brain tumors.
“Our next job is how can we get them into more solid tumors or into places that it’s hard to get to because the immune system doesn’t really get there as well as it should,” Higman said.
“Like the brain—chemo often doesn’t get there because of the way that the blood-brain barrier works. So what we really need to do is build more things to keep it around for everybody.”
Also from good News Network:
Crocheted Christmas Tree Knit Together A Community of Women…
by Andy Corbley
Saying the world didn’t need another fake, plastic Christmas tree, 25 women in India’s state of Goa designed and manufactured an incredible 18-foot Christmas tree made entirely of crocheted yarn.
The community tree was designed to help revive a fading craft, feature women’s labor, and offer a sustainable alternative to plastic-heavy festive décor.
Located inside the Museum of Goa, the tree features more than a thousand individually crocheted squares made by 25 talented women of the Crochet Collective, an inter-generational, inter-continental collaboration that wields this introduced form of craft to help knit a community together.
Brilliantly told by Leila Badyari at The Better India, the story of this Collective effort begins in August, at the group’s first meeting over Zoom. Apart from the three organizers, Sheena Pereira, Sharmila Majumdar, and Sophy Sivaraman, none of the 25 crochet artists had met each other before.
The whole reason for their meeting was a dream that Pereira had about making a crocheted Christmas tree. If the surname here sounds distinctly un-Indian, that’s because Goa was a Portuguese colony, and crochet a direct, 15th century Portuguese import. Another of the 25 women is named Jennifer Fernandes, for example.
The crochet group began online during COVID, but Pereira wanted to take it offline with in-person meetups, and it was the connection with Sivaraman that gave her the impetus. At the Zoom meeting, no one could give an estimate on how big the tree would be, how it would be shaped, or how long it would take to finish.
“We decided to begin anyway,” Majumdar told The Better India. “We felt the place would come.”
And so the 50 skilled hands began their needlework, and as the weeks turned to months, the tree began to take shape. The Collective would meet at Majumdar’s home in Goa. There would be tea, coffee, music, and conversations of days gone by; of family, of childhoods.
Things really accelerated when a local civil engineer quickly welded a conical tree frame out of metal and donated it, along with the transportation, to the Collective without charging a rupee.
Suddenly, there was something on which to tie the 800 hand-crafted squares, and once they had the tree frame, the Museum of Goa opened its doors to feature the tree squarely in its “We Gather” collaboration.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this big,” Sivaraman admitted, laughing. “But then again, none of us knew how big it would become.”
The question of size, during the monsoon season, quickly became a problem of size: the squares they had been weaving were too small, but they had used up almost all their yarn and couldn’t start over. So they began using their own yarn collections, or unraveling old pieces they didn’t care for anymore. The result was beautiful, unpredictable, originality.
“That’s why you see unexpected shades,” Sivaraman says. “Pink. Orange. Everything. There’s no factory-made decorations. Just what we already had.”
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