Harry Reid says he’s cancer free

Former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday he is cancer free after undergoing an experimental treatment. 

“There’s no comparison to how I feel,” Reid told The Washington Post, comparing his state to one year ago when his pancreatic cancer almost defeated him. 

“I feel good. I’m alive,” he said, adding that he is in “complete remission.”  

Reid is one of four patients who reportedly joined a phase one clinical study for patients suffering from certain forms of pancreatic, breast and brain cancers, the Post reports. 

“Consider the senator the first astronaut to the new universe,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, an executive director of the UCLA Wireless Health Institute, told the newspaper during a conference call with Reid. 

Soon-Shiong, a cancer specialist who has spent the last decade working on alternative cancer treatments, credits the new drug with saving Reid’s life. 

Reid started the new treatment regimen with Soon-Shiong last September. 

Soon-Shiong described the treatment as infusing a “natural killer cell” that researchers engineered to grow in an “unlimited supply.”

“We’ve engineered this killer cell to go directly toward the cancer and kill it,” Soon-Shiong said on Fox Business. 

Reid said in the interview the side effects of the treatment were “fairly minimal.”

Soon-Shiong is the CEO of NantKwest and ImmunityBio. The company has been cleared to start a phase two trial for his treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer, using a new IV therapy that allowed Reid to do sessions as an outpatient, according to the Post. 

Reid also encouraged others diagnosed with cancer to stay strong. 

“When someone has been diagnosed with cancer, don’t throw up your arms and give up,” Reid said on Fox Business.