By Kayla DeKraker
JURASSIC PARK actor Sam Neill is celebrating being cancer free, thanks to a life-saving treatment.
“I’ve been living with a particular type of lymphoma for about five years, and I was on chemotherapy and the pretty miserable business, but it was keeping me alive,” he told Australia’s 7 News. “Then the chemo stopped working. I was at a loss, and it looked like I was on the way out, which wasn’t ideal obviously.”
Neill was living with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It is a rare cancer that “that affects the lymphatic system, usually found in the lymph nodes.” Lymphoma.org explains that “NHL is not a single disease but rather a group of several closely related cancers, called lymphoid neoplasms. The most recent 2016 revision of the World Health Organization classification of lymphoid neoplasms estimates that there are at least 86 types of NHL.”
Because he wasn’t responding to chemo, as a last-ditch effort, doctors put Neill on CAR T-cell therapy. The American Cancer Society describes the therapy as “a personalized form of immunotherapy that trains your own immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer. It can be a powerful option for treating certain hard-to-treat blood cancers, especially when other treatments are no longer effective.”
Thankfully, Neill’s body responded.
“I’ve just had a scan just now, and there is no cancer in my body, that’s an extraordinary thing,” he said.
During his cancer battle, Neill penned a memoir titled Did I Ever Tell You This?, which released in 2024.
He was diagnosed in 2022 after some strange symptoms.
“I noticed the glands seemed to be up in my neck region but gave it very little thought. My agent had to kill a few photographs because my neck looked lumpy,” Neill said. “Alan Grant doesn’t have a lumpy neck, it seems.”
He continued, “Within a few days I was lying on a hospital bed having all kinds of chemicals draining into my system, killing everything aboard. For therapeutic reasons. To be cured of a thing I didn’t know I had just a few days ago.”
Now, Neill advocates for new therapies to help others facing cancer. In a post to Instagram, he said,
“Thanks to science I am cancer free,” he posted on Instagram. “I don’t really like talking about me and cancer. Makes me uncomfortable.”
“…Then out of the blue I found myself on a clinical trial. This for a new type of CAR-T therapy, that was aimed at my particular lymphoma. All brand new,” he said. “We were sailing into uncharted waters. No one knew exactly what we could expect.”
“And last week I had all the scans etc., and I am pleased, indeed delighted to say that there is no cancer in my body. All clear. We are all amazed,” Neill celebrated. “Treatments like this — CAR-T therapies and others coming through in a rapidly changing medical world — I hope to be available to everyone who needs them in Australia & NZ (and worldwide).”
Hopefully other can benefit from the treatment soon.
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