Film Screening and Panel Discussion: N of 1

Sometimes, in medicine, innovation can come from unexpected sources. N of 1 follows a striking mix of characters on an international journey to save the life of Kayte, a 26-year-old from Alabama, whose doctors had run out of options for treating her rare, highly lethal liver cancer. Via a Facebook group for the few people in the world sharing her diagnosis, Kayte connects with Howard, a Canadian electronics businessman with no medical training, who has doubled in his spare time as a patient advocate, often scouring medical journals to understand cancer better to help patients like her. Howard recruits for Kayte a pioneering immunologist from Israel and renowned transplant surgeon from England to travel to India, where Kayte will undergo a first-of-its-kind procedure to save her life, and possibly dramatically advance traditional cancer treatment as we know it. This experimental treatment, a partial bone marrow transplant followed by a live liver transplant, may have pushed the regulatory boundaries of evidence-based medicine. But when you’re an N of 1 — a singular patient, dying from a very rare and little researched disease — in the words of Kayte, to get to a cure, “someone has to be the first to say ‘I’ll try it.’”