After almost five years of battling stage-three blood cancer, former “Jurassic Park” star and New Zealand/Australia national treasure Sam Neill has confirmed he’s cancer-free.
Speaking with 7 News Australia (via Variety), he said: “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.”
After the chemo stopped working, he said “I was at a loss, and it looked like I was on the way out, which wasn’t ideal obviously.”
He then underwent a cutting-edge and very personalised treatment called CAR T-cell therapy, which involves genetic modification of his immune cells (T cells) to recognise and kill cancer cells – especially in the blood.
The procedure worked with Neill saying: “I’ve just had a scan just now and there is no cancer in my body, that’s an extraordinary thing. I’m very, very excited that this can happen… It’s time I did another movie.”
Neill went public with his initial diagnosis in 2023 after being diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma while out promoting “Jurassic World Dominion”. Upon the reveal, he famously said: “I’m not afraid to die, but it would annoy me.”
Neill is now advocating for the treatment, CAR T-cell therapy, to be rolled out across the country (it is still currently in clinical trials).
