The ex-cop who travelled overseas for cancer treatment, but didn’t make it home

Tuesday, 13 May 2025

Increasingly, New Zealanders are flying offshore for a revolutionary cancer treatment that can put patients with only months to live into long-term remission.

In a five-part investigation, senior reporter Nicholas Jones tells some of those stories, and looks at what it will take to embed CAR T-cell therapy into New Zealand’s health system. This is part two. You can read part one here.

Cancer had reached Dale Kahaki’s liver, and he could barely walk onto the plane.

The father of two from Hamilton knew getting to Shanghai, China was his last chance. Doctors were ready to administer a cutting-edge treatment that had put other cancer patients considered hopeless cases into remission.

Kahaki had been to the mega-city weeks earlier, in late June 2024, and over six hours had his blood drawn and circulated through a machine next to his bed at the SinoUnited Health Hospital.

The contraption separated his immune cells, which were sent to a laboratory and genetically modified to recognise and destroy the mantle cell lymphoma cancer overwhelming his body.

The 61-year-old returned to Hamilton during that process, and a month later flew back to receive his turbo-boosted T cells. It was a last roll of the dice, but had hopeful odds.

CAR T-cell therapy has a success rate of as much as 40% for one common type of lymphoma, with those patients still in remission five years later and effectively cured.

The treatment isn’t as effective against mantle cell lymphoma, which isn’t considered curable, but if successful could extend Kahaki’s life by years.

However, his condition on the return trip alarmed the SinoUnited team.

“When we picked him up from the airport he could barely stand up or talk,” Dr Lily Zhou, chief of haematology at the private hospital, told Stuff.

Zhou discussed palliative care, and offered a partial refund of the $340,000 treatment cost.

“But he said, ‘Since I’m already here I want to give it a last try, because that will be my last chance.’”

His wife Sacha, a professional photographer, flew over. Kahaki was isolated, and his bed covered by a tent pumped full of filtered air.

After a week she was asked to sign documents, stating her agreement that the hospital had done all it could. That night she insisted on staying with her husband.

“He asked, and I wasn’t going to move. It was probably the last time we really talked properly, before he started going. We had this amazing conversation.”

Kahaki was moved to a public hospital’s critical care unit, and died on August 10.

In the hospital morgue Sacha and her friend Karli Joll, who had made a mercy dash from New Zealand, called home.

“Dale’s sister had come up to be with my kids, and his cousin, and we arranged for everybody to be at home so we could do a karakia.”

China’s censorship firewall meant most video calling apps were blocked, but Sacha used Snapchat with her teenage daughter, which still worked.

“Poor Karli was holding the phone, so she saw my kids’ reactions when they saw their Dad.”

When Sacha got back to Aotearoa five days later, she carried her husband’s ashes and was met by his relatives and the wailing of tangihanga.

“They took him inside. They were grateful that I brought him home.”

Before going to China, Kahaki spoke to Stuff, and agreed to do a story upon his return.

He believed in CAR T-cell therapy and wanted to raise awareness of it, and the efforts to bring it to New Zealand.

Sacha knows her husband would still want his story told. CAR T came too late for him, she said, but can help others.

“It could have gone so differently. We were on that knife edge.”

Stomach pain the first sign of cancer

She and Dale knew each other most of their lives - their fathers were workmates, hers a builder and his an electrician.

“Dad remembers Dale’s dad leaving work early to pick up his baby boy that they were adopting.

“We didn’t know each other that well growing up, because he was nine years older … when we got together we knew the families, there were no surprises - I just had to stop calling his mum and dad aunty and uncle.”

Two children, Isla and Reed, now aged 16 and 14, followed. Kahaki’s job in the police included close protection work for Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visited New Zealand, and other VIPs including Prince Charles and Prime Minister John Key.

In 2016 he attended a car crash that claimed the lives of children. That caused a mental breakdown, and it was during his time off work that his cancer surfaced as stomach pain and bleeding.

After a colonoscopy the then 51-year-old was diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma, and began chemotherapy. A stem cell transplant and unfunded immunotherapy checked the disease for seven years, but in February last year scans showed he had months to live.

Kahaki (Ngāti Porou) pinned his hopes on CAR T, and spoke to Kiwis who had undergone the cell therapy overseas.

They included David Downs, a businessman and former comedian and actor, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma around the same time.

In 2018 a chance meeting with a Pfizer executive enabled Downs - who’d been given a 5% chance of living another year - to receive CAR T as part of a clinical trial in Boston, United States.

The other participants were just as sick, but four out of five were cured by the therapy.

Downs has devoted much of his second life to helping others get the treatment, and is a board member for the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, which is running a highly-promising local CAR T trial.

He linked Kahaki up with a Shanghai-based New Zealander who’d successfully received CAR T from Dr Zhou.

The cost was high, but cheaper than the $1m plus fee in the United States or Australia.

Kahaki filled a white board with notes, and cashed in his police superannuation. But underneath the enthusiasm lurked fear, Sacha suspects.

“Dale was telling everybody about this treatment, he was spending a lot of time on the phone, but I was mad because he wouldn’t go and get it done himself. He was kind of dilly-dallying.”

When he collected his visa Kahaki posted to Instagram, overlaid with Etta James’s At Last. His final post was July 12. In a hoarse voice he apologised for the lack of update since returning from his first Shanghai trip.

“The last two weeks I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck and it’s then backed back over me. Just absolutely knackered, and heaps of fatigue, lots of sleeping … breathlessness …”

He forced himself onto the flight back the following Thursday. When the couple’s friends realised things were going badly, Joll, a physiotherapist at Waikato Hospital, jumped on a plane.

She planned to be in Shanghai for five days, “but when it became clear Dale wasn't going to survive, I said to Sacha, ‘I'm not leaving you here.’”

The girlfriends had met 16 years earlier, at antenatal class - “I was pregnant with twins, Sacha took a shine to me because I was the only one fatter than her” - and their shared sense of humour helped pull them through the awfulness of China.

After Kahaki died, Lihao Dong, a SinoUnited operations manager who Sacha said helped immensely in those difficult days, took them to a crematorium.

“It was the weirdest day of my life,” Sacha said. “It was like a massive bus terminal, and busy and hot as hell. There was a big TV screen of all the people getting cremated, and Dale’s name was up the top.”

They said their goodbyes in a vast hall. The emptiness felt special after the chaos outside, despite locals crowding the entranceway. Sacha assumed they were the next group of mourners, but then realised the crematorium staff wanted to glimpse the foreign spectacle.

“I’m quite tall, and here was this man who could hardly fit on the gurney, with these massive Māori feet sticking out from the sheet over him.”

She chose the simplest urn for his ashes, but was told it was for a woman. The next least-ornate option was adorned with dragons.

“Dale wouldn’t even watch Game of Thrones with me, and I’m choosing a f**king dragon box. But that night I said to Karli, ‘Oh my God, Waikato, taniwhas - it’s perfect!’

“There were these weird moments when we were almost hysterical.”

On the flight home (with Air NZ permission) the urn was put in a travel-on suitcase and stowed in the overhead compartment.

Sitting with Sacha and Karli below was Dale De Penning, another Kiwi with the same name and disease, who’d been in Shanghai to have his T cell extraction.

The Dales had talked on the phone before their trips - part of an informal network of patients researching CAR T - and saw each other briefly a couple of times once in China.

De Penning (whose story is told in part one of this series) learnt Kahaki had died after seeing Sacha and Joll in their hotel - an emotional gut punch that put him on edge about his own looming cell transfusion.

He needn’t have worried - after initial side-effects including fever and severe headaches, scans have shown he remains clear of his diffuse large B cell lymphoma cancer.

De Penning, Sacha and Joll reunited when they had dinner with Dr Zhou, Lihao and her team, who travelled to New Zealand in March, and met past and prospective patients, haematologists and Malaghan Institute staff, including Downs.

Zhou met Stuff during that tour, and said Kahaki’s death had shaken her.

“I was there [with Dale in critical care], holding his hand, with Sacha and Karli … it is really sad. It took awhile for me to recover, too.

“Part of me felt like, ‘What if I could help him earlier?’ Part of me felt like, ‘Did we do the right thing, shall we not treat him?’ But I know his disease is unstoppable. If you’re not treating, it’s the same. But if it is a success, it may be the last chance.”

So far, 10 New Zealanders have gone to SinoUnited for CAR T. All achieved remission, Zhou said, except for Kahaki and another whose advancing cancer and renal failure stopped his return.

Could CAR T-cell therapy be rolled out here?

Downs and the Malaghan Institute are working to bring the therapy to New Zealand, and have developed a local version that’s highly effective against B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphomas.

More than half of the 30 patients in the first phase were clear of cancer just three months later, and avoided serious side effects.

The trial is now in phase 2, and clinically producing CAR T-cells locally through BioOra, a joint company by Malaghan and private investment firm Bridgewest Ventures.

BioOra wants to greatly scale-up its automated manufacturing, to provide homespun CAR T at a fraction of the cost charged to patients currently.

The aim is to have CAR T in the NZ public health system (via Pharmac) as early as 2027.

The trial and BioOra manufacturing would also clear the way for pharmaceuticals to offer their own CAR T here, Downs said, including for myeloma and brain cancers.

“The New Zealand health system is too hard to deal with, and the market is too small for them to invest the effort required to set up CAR T delivery,” he said.

Progress is threatened, however, by red tape and lack of government support - much of his time is spent fundraising.

Kahaki’s death shows the urgency, Downs said.

“He was a man who had given so much to his country in service, and for him to have to spend his retirement savings travelling to China for treatment that would have helped if he had it sooner is heartbreaking.

“We have the technology to deliver this treatment here - we just need to accelerate the adoption into the mainstream health system.”

Sacha hopes that happens, and other families are spared avoidable heartbreak.

She marked their 20th wedding anniversary, and first apart, last week.

“The hardest thing is probably meal time, we all used to sit down together,” she said. “When we’ve done things as a family of three I say, ‘What would Dad have thought of this?’”