Siddhartha Mukherjee and the song of the T-cell

The Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist talks about his latest book and the promise of a new, accessible pathway to treat cancer in patients for whom chemotherapy has stopped working

A doctor, researcher of translational medicine and author, Siddhartha Mukherjee, 52, is astonishingly eclectic. The Indian-American biologist, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, has been on an enduring quest to discover new treatments that could give cancer patients a fresh lease of life.

ALSO READ Providing affordable cancer treatment in India paramount: Physician 

In his latest book, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, which has been named  The  New York Times ‘Notable Book of 2022’, Mukherjee characteristically uses metaphors: an antibody, for instance, becomes a ‘gunslinging sheriff’.

On his visit to India, he is juggling between speaking at the Kolkata and Jaipur lit fests and monitoring his team’s clinical work in India. He may look sleep deprived, but the excitement in his voice is palpable. On January 21, Mukherjee and his colleagues will introduce to the world some of India’s first cancer patients to be treated with T-cell therapy. T-cells, which develop from stem cells in the bone marrow, are an essential part of the immune system and normally kill virus particles and infected cells. However, when genetically modified, emerging science shows they may be used to treat advanced cancer. If successful, it will be India’s ‘Emily Whitehead moment’.

Whitehead, now 17, suffered a near-fatal recurrence of cancer when she was six; she became the first child in the world to receive T-cell therapy and is now considered cured 11 years later. Mukherjee describes meeting her in 2019 in  The Song of the Cell:

‘I wondered how she felt, knowing that there were three versions of her in the hospital: the one here today, on a break from school; the one in the pictures, who had lived and almost died in the ICU; and the one frozen in the Krusty the Clown freezer next door.

“Do you remember coming into the hospital?” I asked.