Colon cancer patient ‘disease free’ after he had weeks to live, from cell transfer therapy

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A father of two who was given only months to live after being diagnosed with terminal colon cancer six years ago, has told how he managed to obtain a combination of cutting edge treatments in Japan to survive and become “disease free”. Now Matthew Dons wants to help other cancer patients and show how they can find other options for treatment that they may not have originally been offered. “I often see in Facebook groups people have been told they are inoperable or that they don’t have the right ‘type’ of cancer for immunotherapy,” he told i. “That’s not really the truth. If the surgeon says their patient is inoperable, what they really mean is that they can’t do the operation at their hospital at that time.

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But with his children aged just two and seven, he refused to accept his fate. NHS treatment would have involved urgent surgery followed by chemotherapy. But Mr Dons, who divides his time between the UK and Japan, was concerned that a cancer drug called Avastin, was not widely available in the UK. So he opted to seek out other forms of treatment abroad that were not available to him had he stayed in Norwich. “I really wanted to live for my kids so started studying as much as I could on potential treatments, without really understanding what I was studying, going on Facebook groups for different cancer types, asking people about what treatments they had, the side effects they got and the results,” he said. “I was eventually connected to an immunotherapist in Japan, who does a treatment called adoptive cell transfer.” The technique, also known as cellular immunotherapy, is only available in a handful of places as a lot of countries, including the UK, believe there is not enough evidence yet to offer it more widely.

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