Blood cancer treatment helps save lives

September is Blood Cancer Awareness Month, and every three minutes someone in the United States is diagnosed with a blood cancer. A third of people diagnosed with blood cancer don't survive another five years, and it is the third leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. The good news is that survival rates have greatly improved over the last 50 years, and some new experimental therapies are helping. Emily Dumler is a mom of three young children, and she's just one of the success stories. She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma 5 years ago. Emily underwent chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant and spent months in the hospital but relapsed each time. She was given 6 months to live in 2015, but she was the third patient in the world enrolled in CAR T Therapy. CAR T stands for Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy, which is a type of treatment known as immunotherapy. With CAR T therapy, your T cells are modified to recognize cancer cells in order to effectively target and destroy them. Emily, along with Dr. Gwen Nichols from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society spoke to Great Day Live’s Rachel Platt and Tony Vanetti about the treatment.