Public investments in biomedical research have an outsized effect, driving new scientific insights, economic growth, and ultimately treatments and cures.
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Stephen Bagley and Eduart Cuka celebrating the MRI showing that Cuka’s tumor had shrunk in June 2025.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)
After Eduart Cuka’s glioblastoma diagnosis in October 2023, he endured an onslaught of treatments. And still, his aggressive brain tumor grew.
He knew that the average life expectancy with glioblastoma was measured in months, not years. For decades, glioblastoma has been seen as an incurable disease that almost always comes back. Yet Cuka’s faith was unshakeable.
“I’m going to beat this,” he promised his tearful wife, Juliana, when they first heard his diagnosis.
After exhausting standard treatments, the 54-year-old father of two had one option left: a clinical trial led by his oncologist, Stephen Bagley, an assistant professor of hematology-oncology and neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine. The Cukas learned how Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center pioneered CAR T cell therapy, which genetically modifies and multiplies a patient’s own immune cells to turn them into supercharged cancer-fighting machines. The treatment works well on some blood cancers. But how would it work on the nastiest of brain cancers? Eduart Cuka volunteered to help scientists answer that question.
In July 2024, Bagley injected 10 million CAR T cells into Cuka’s cerebrospinal fluid. The treatment reduced his tumor—a remarkable success for recurrent glioblastoma—and bought him another eight months before a scan revealed that the cancer was growing again.
Bagley recommended another CAR T infusion in March 2025, this time with a higher dose. A follow-up scan in June 2025 brought joyful news: The tumor had shrunk. Just a few days later, the Cukas were able to attend their son’s college graduation together.
“It hasn’t been an easy journey, but we couldn’t have done this without the amazing team at Penn,” says Juliana Cuka. “They really work tirelessly for their patients and on the research to find cures.”
The cycle from discovery to discovery, with impact
Behind every story like the Cuka family’s is not just a team of dedicated medical professionals, but a whole system of innovation, investment, and continuous learning. Federal research funding is often one of the most powerful accelerants behind the process, which works as a virtuous cycle that propels early ideas sparked in a lab through to rigorous testing, new business development, job creation, economic activity, and in the best cases, the ultimate goal of lives saved and diseases cured.
The successful development of CAR T cell therapy at Penn Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia brought cures to thousands of patients and opened the floodgates to an entire burgeoning industry of commercial immune cell therapies. Another impact: Penn’s campus is a major hub for lab-based discoveries that will power future treatments. But the most promising ideas emerging from research labs need funding to get to the patient’s bedside for further testing. Recent clinical trials at the Abramson Cancer Center—one using a dual-target CAR T approach for glioblastoma patients, and another using an “armored” CAR T cell therapy for blood cancers—have made important advances toward new therapies.
Growing partnerships and the local economy
Partnerships with industry make it possible for therapies to be studied in greater numbers of patients, a critical step to eventually secure approval from the Food and Drug Administration for widespread use. Penn Medicine’s Co-Investment Program is a unique way the organization supports spinout companies to commercialize intellectual property from Penn Medicine labs. These companies have helped power the local economy, creating hundreds of jobs and attracting more than $1 billion of investment.
Continuous cycles of research to improve treatments
Even when some patients respond well to a new treatment, there is always more work to be done to help the patients that don’t. That means returning to the lab and turning new cycles of the discovery process, which takes more time and funding. It’s an area where academic institutions have a dedicated interest in continuing to make more early-stage discoveries to bring ideas to patients faster.
This story is by Nicole Sweeney Etter and Rachel Ewing. Read more at Penn Medicine News.
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