It's Personal - The Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation

Patient Stories

Nunzio Varricchio - this time he won!

Nunzio Varricchio has had a long-term relationship with Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH). Despite being a strong and healthy man—even a top 10 contender for the 1968 Mr. Ontario title—he received his first cancer diagnosis in 1977—soft tissue sarcoma in his left arm. There are two main types of sarcoma: osteosarcoma, which develops from bone; and soft tissue sarcomas, which can develop from tissues like fat, muscle, nerves, blood vessels, or deep skin tissues. They can be found in any part of the body, but most of them develop in the arms or legs. Coincidentally, 1977 was the same year that a young 19-year old boy named Terry Fox received his diagnosis of osteosarcoma.

When Nunzio was treated for sarcoma, the hospital was still located on Sherbourne Street, and many people in the city thought of it as ‘the place you go to die’. But Nunzio was given three options for treating his sarcoma: do nothing and hope for the best, amputate his arm at the shoulder, or try radiation. He chose radiation, and was cancer-free for the next 20 years of his life!

Then in 1997, he returned to Princess Margaret Hospital and received his second cancer diagnosis—Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Over the next ten years, his lymphoma was treated in several ways—with chemotherapy and then with a stem cell transplant—treatments that have a good success rate. But as Nunzio said, “I was in the other group.”

In 2006, as Nunzio’s prognosis grew poorer with new tumours appearing in his stomach and other organs, his doctor, Dr. Armand Keating, suggested he would be a good candidate for a new clinical trial. This Phase I trial was testing a highly-experimental protocol where patients were injected with natural killer (NK) immune cells. These cells were originally harvested from a donor who ironically had developed a malignancy in his own natural killer cells. Those harvested cells were first irradiated to ensure that they were ‘disease free’ and then cloned in the laboratory under highly sterile conditions. Fortunately, they retained their anti-cancer abilities after they were irradiated.

According to all the tests he has been given, Nunzio appears to be cancer free almost four years after his treatment with NK cells.

Phase I clinical trials are usually performed on a small number of patients, and the purpose is to confirm the safety of the procedure, and, in the case of new drugs, to determine the optimum dosage. Six other patients to-date have received the same treatment at PMH as Nunzio, and all tolerated the treatment well with no toxic side effects. Several other patients responded to the treatment, but only Nunzio went into complete remission.

“I hope I live long enough to see this treatment offered to many more patients,” Nunzio says. Knowing that new experimental treatments are costly, he is grateful that he had the opportunity to be part of the clinical trial. Natural killer cells allowed this Mr. Ontario competitor to go another round with his lymphoma, and this time he won!