Dallas Carroll was pregnant with her second son when she found a lump in her breast in April 2023. By that October, she had noticed nipple retraction, skin dimpling and swollen lymph nodes. Despite her repeatedly flagging the changes, a nurse practitioner assured her everything was fine.
Carroll gave birth to her son, Dakota, on Dec. 1 in Alabama. On Dec. 7, after a doctor escalated her concerns, she finally received a diagnosis: Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread to her liver and bones. The life that she’d known was shattered.
“A lot of the time with breast cancer, you hear ‘think pink,’ and walks, and ‘you’re going to beat this,’” says Carroll, 31. “But people with early-stage breast cancer are not dying from this like (in) Stage 4. ... Hearing people say, ‘Oh, you’re going to beat this,’ is really hard to hear when you have Stage 4 cancer.”
At her sister’s urging, Carroll reached out to Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa for a second opinion. To her surprise, the staff asked her to postpone any treatment. Instead, they offered her the chance to be their second-ever patient for a new treatment.
It’s called conventional dendritic cell therapy, and it’s a form of immunotherapy, says Moffitt’s chair of the department of breast oncology, Dr. Brian Czerniecki. He started developing it in his previous roles at the National Cancer Institute and the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the only doctor in Florida offering the treatment.
Dendritic cells are specialized cells that guide the body’s immune response. The treatment takes a patient’s blood cells, turns some of them into dendritic cells, and loads them with cancer-fighting properties. That concoction is then injected straight into the patient’s tumor, where it prompts the immune system to launch an internal war on the mass. “It sets off a unique signal that changes everything about the tumor.” Czerniecki says.
Carroll agreed to the trial and moved her family to temporary housing in Florida. She received six injections in her first round of treatment. And, slowly, she watched her cancer melt away.
“I could physically feel the mass in my breast shrinking. It just got smaller each time ... It worked really, really well.”
It worked so well that Carroll received two more rounds of treatment as well as chemotherapy. Thanks to the successful treatments, she became a candidate for surgery — an option most metastatic patients aren’t offered if the cancer has spread too much. In July, she received a mastectomy, reconstruction and lymphatic bypass on her left breast. Czerniecki now says she has no evidence of disease.
He has treated more than 300 people with dendritic cell therapy, and hopes it will someday allow patients with smaller tumors to skip chemotherapy entirely. If all goes according to plan, he estimates a five- to seven-year timeline for FDA approval.