Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of former US President John F. Kennedy, touched many Americans over the weekend with her emotional essay about being diagnosed with terminal cancer shortly after giving birth to her second child.
IN New YorkerThe 35-year-old stunned readers by revealing she was battling acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive blood cancer, and had less than a year to live.
Doctors and researchers say the essay has helped raise awareness of the deadly disease and the urgent need for more funding and research to fight treatment-resistant cancer.
“This is a very moving and courageous essay,” said Vijay Sankaran, a physician at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “She comes from a very noble family, but anyone can get cancer, even a young and seemingly healthy person.”
In an essay titled “Battle with My Blood,” Schlossberg said she was diagnosed after doctors noticed an abnormally high white blood cell count after the birth of her daughter in May 2024.
The daughter of designer Edwin Schlossberg and diplomat Caroline Kennedy, she said she was shocked by the diagnosis because she considered herself “one of the healthiest people I knew.”
One of the dangers of acute myeloid leukemia is that it can occur suddenly, starting from being undetectable to affecting hundreds of cells in a matter of days, Dr. Shankaran said.
Cancers that affect both the bone marrow and blood are rare and affect four in 100,000 adults each year.
A subtype of Schlossberg leukemia, a chromosomal abnormality formerly called inversion 3, is even rarer, affecting only 1 to 2% of people with acute myeloid leukemia.
A rare genetic mutation makes Schlossberg's cancer even more dangerous. It's one of the few types of acute myeloid leukemia for which there are few effective treatments, meaning remission or cure is “in the minority,” said Courtney DiNardo, a professor of leukemia at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
The most common treatments include bone marrow transplant, chemotherapy, and clinical trials.
Schlossberg tried them all.
In her essay, she described how transplant doctors removed her sister's arms and the chemotherapy that caused her to lose her once “great hair.”
She joined a clinical trial of CAR-T cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy for certain blood cancers, in which, she said, scientists “engineered my sister's T cells to attack my cancer cells.”
While this therapy has been revolutionary for other types of leukemia, it is not as effective for acute myeloid leukemia, Dr. Shankaran says.
During the last clinical trial, her doctor told Schlossberg that he could “keep me alive for maybe a year.”
She also discussed fighting cancer while watching her cousin, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., sharply cut funding for research, including cancer research. She and other family members have been vocal critics of Kennedy since his unsuccessful presidential campaign and candidacy as a doctor.
“As I spent more and more of my life under the care of doctors, nurses and researchers committed to improving the lives of others, I watched as Bobby committed nearly half a billion dollars to research into mRNA vaccines, a technology that could be used against some types of cancer,” Schlossberg wrote.
Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, announced in August that he was withdrawing funding over claims that “mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits” for some respiratory viruses. He also revoked funding for hundreds of research grants through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Even though the mRNA funding cuts only affected respiratory viruses, they had a chilling effect on the entire mRNA research community, said Jeff Koller, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on RNA therapeutics.
“We've seen that researchers are frankly afraid to prepare clinical trial proposals using mRNA. And we call them cancer vaccines,” he said.
The NIH was once a global leader in funding biomedical research, but that changed this year, Dr. Shankaran said.
“That was a limitation because you could just imagine that you would have to make more shots at goal to actually do a study that would successfully lead to a treatment,” he said.
Schlossberg's struggles, despite having access to better health care as a member of a prominent American family, highlight the need for more funding to develop better screening and treatment tools for all patients, doctors said.
“[Schlossberg] still has a poor prognosis even with the best tools available, and so I think this just underscores our need to do better for many of our patients,” Dr. Shankaran said.
