The revolution begins.

She was six years old when they diagnosed her with leukemia.

The doctors didn’t think she would ever see seven. They had tried radiation, marrow transplants and every chemical cocktail imaginable, all to no avail. They bad run out of options. Emily Whitehead lay wasting away on a hospital bed, her hair gone, legs too weak to stand.

One of her doctors suggested an experimental therapy at Penn Medicine. The on clinical trial entailed genetically tweaking Emily’s T cells—her ‘hunter’ immune cells—so they could see and attack cancer as they would any other virus. Others had tried this before, none successfully.

The body’s natural immune system can’t ‘see’ cancerous cells. Cancerous cells are encased in normal proteins because they started out as normal cells. They look perfectly fine to the immune system. But CRISPR allowed scientists to cut tiny sections out of a DNA strand and replace them with a manufactured section, so that the immune cells could identify a chunk of DNA common to the cancer and attack it full force.

The doctors drew blood, tweaked the T cells, cultivated those T cells and dripped them back into Emily’s arm. She spiked a fever immediately, a good sign. The T cells were attacking something. The doctors induced a coma and Emily’s fever raged on for three days, then subsided suddenly. When she came to, doctors could not find one cancerous cell in a million. She remains cancer free today.

Thus began the immunrevolution.