Lymphoma Survivor Gene Wilder Continues Stem Cell Advocacy

Think Gene Wilder and cancer in the same sentence, we’re most likely to think of Gilda Radner, Wilder’s wife and fellow comedienne, who died from ovarian cancer. Her death prompted his active involvement in promoting cancer awareness and treatment, helping found the Gilda Radner Ovarian Cancer Detection Center in Los Angeles and co-founding Gilda's Club, a network of meeting places where men, women and children living with cancer and their families and friends join with others to build emotional and social support as a supplement to medical care.

We don’t often remember that a decade after Gilda’s death in 1989, Wilder faced his own battle with cancer. In 1999, Wilder discovered he had non-Hodgkin lymphoma. After undergoing chemotherapy and a non-embryonic stem cell transplant, he has been in complete remission since 2005. Generally reticent to enter political involvement, he became a vocal Obama supporter last year. He expressed dismay over Christopher Reeve’s death just six weeks before he was scheduled for an embryonic stem cell transplant in another country.

Now in his 70s, Wilder lives in Connecticut with his fourth wife, speech pathologist Karen Boyer, in an 18th-Century house Radner left to him in her will. You can read more about his cancer struggle in his memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art.

To see an interview with Wilder on his lymphoma, go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiKdTtzVK_U

Blog Category: 

More Articles

More Articles

Amazon.com is pleased to have the Lymphoma Information Network in the family of Amazon.com associates. We've agreed to ship items...

The question ought to be what are myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), since this is a group of similar blood and bone marrow diseases that...

Merkel Cell Carcinoma (MCC) is a very rare and aggressive skin cancer that usually develops when a person is in his or her 70s. It is...

Radiation Therapy Topics

...

At some point, the Seattle biotech company Cell Therapeutics Inc (CTI) should earn an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for utter and...

Site Beginnings

This site was started as Lymphoma Resource Page(s) in 1994. The site was designed to collect lymphoma...

Three papers appearing in the journal Blood and pointing towards a regulator-suppressor pill could offer hope to blood cancer...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a third so-called Breakthrough Therapy Designation for the investigational oral...

The US Food and Drug Administration today has approved an expanded use of Imbruvica (ibrutinib) in patients with...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced that it has granted "Breakthrough Therapy Designation" for the investigational agent...

According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of California, San...

Pharmacyclics has announced that the company has submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for...

New research suggests that frontline radioimmunotherapy...

Gilead Sciences has announced results of the company's Phase II study of its investigational compound idelalisib, an oral inhibitor of...

Sitemap