Sam Neill has announced he is now cancer-free after undergoing a new treatment when chemotherapy stopped working on his stage-three blood cancer.<\/p>\n
The Jurassic Park actor made the announcement on Australian broadcaster 7News<\/a> while advocating for CAR T-cell therapy \u2013 a form of cancer immunotherapy which he underwent as part of a clinical trial \u2013 to be rolled out for blood cancer patients across Australia.<\/p>\n Neill first revealed that he was being treated for stage-three angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma in his 2023 memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This? When the book was published, the actor was taking a new chemotherapy drug monthly to keep the cancer at bay, telling the Guardian<\/a>: \u201cI\u2019m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been living with a particular type of lymphoma for about five years and I was on chemotherapy, [which is] pretty miserable business but it was keeping me alive,\u201d Neill told 7News.<\/p>\n But when chemotherapy stopped working, he said: \u201cI was at a loss and it looked like I was on the way out \u2013 which wasn\u2019t ideal obviously.\u201d<\/p>\n Neill then took part in a CAR T-cell therapy clinical trial that is focused on his type of lymphoma in Australia.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve just had a scan just now and there is no cancer in my body, that\u2019s an extraordinary thing,\u201d Neill said. \u201cI\u2019m very, very excited that this can happen.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cIt\u2019s time I did another movie.\u201d<\/p>\n CAR T-cell therapy is currently only available under Australia\u2019s public health system for certain cancers at certain hospitals; privately, the treatment currently costs upwards of A$600,000 (\u00a3320,000, US$430,000) per patient in Australia.<\/p>\n car t-cell explainer<\/a><\/p>\n The 78-year-old actor was speaking as part of a campaign to ask Australia\u2019s state and federal governments to expand the availability of CAR T-cell therapy for more cancer patients, with the help of not-for-profit blood cancer foundation Snowdome.<\/p>\n Known as CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cell therapy, the treatment involves taking T-cells, a type of white blood cell, from a patient and genetically engineering them to target and kill cancer cells. These modified T-cells are grown in a laboratory and then infused back into the patient.<\/p>\n CAR T-cell therapy has proved particularly successful in treating certain types of blood cancers. Response rates have been less encouraging in solid tumours<\/a>, with long-term outcomes unclear. However, in 2025, US researchers revealed a woman who had been treated with CAR T-cell therapy as a child for neuroblastoma, a type of solid tumour, had remained cancer-free for 18 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n Neill thanked the scientists who helped him, writing on social media, \u201cI am still processing this miraculous information. But of course it is not a miracle, it is science at its best. And a lot of people who care deeply about their work and their patients. I am immensely grateful.<\/p>\n \u201cTreatments like this \u2013 CAR-T therapies and others coming through in a rapidly changing medical world \u2013 I hope to be available to everyone who needs them in Australia and NZ (and worldwide).<\/p>\n \u201cThis is what I am advocating, along with The Snowdome Foundation, to push for exactly that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Neill has announced he is now cancer-free after undergoing a new treatment when chemotherapy stopped working on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637602,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-637601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}