‘We couldn’t believe it’: Trail-blazing professor’s ‘stunning’ comeback from cancer

Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Richard Watt was told he was essentially out of treatment options for his blood cancer, lymphoma, and travelled to India for cutting edge Car T-cell treatment. He is now in complete remission.

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 investigates what it will take to embed CAR T-cell therapy into New Zealand’s health system. This is part three. You can read part one here, and part two here.

Canterbury University economics professor Richard Watt is a trail blazer - one of the first foreigners, and very likely the first Kiwi, to receive a breakthrough cancer treatment in India.

Watt, 62, researched getting CAR T-cell therapy overseas, and after seeing the prices paid by other Kiwis to clinics in China, Australia and the United States he has some advice.

“Shop around … all I can vouch for is what I underwent in India was completely first rate.”

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy involves the collection of a patient’s immune cells - taken from the blood using a special machine - which are frozen and then genetically modified to recognise and kill their cancer, and then infused back into the patient’s blood.

Richard Watt with his wife Martha, who travelled to India with him for his CAR T-cell therapy treatment.

It’s now used overseas for types of blood cancers including relapsed lymphoma, leukaemia and myeloma.

The therapy isn’t available publicly or privately here, although an ongoing clinical trial through Wellington’s Malaghan Institute of Medical Research has produced astonishing early results - more than half of phase 1 patients with B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphomas, who had exhausted all other options, were clear of cancer just three months later.

The cost to get it overseas can be eye-watering: more than $1 million in Australia and the US, and about $350,000-$400,000 in China.

Most of that cost is to cover manufacturing/laboratory work, but smaller biotech companies are finding cheaper methods of production, including in India.

Richard Watt, a professor in economics at the University of Canterbury, received life-saving CAR T-cell therapy at Cytecare Hospital in Bengaluru, India, in 2024.

Watt looked to the country after running out of good treatment options for his stage 3 follicular lymphoma.

A serious runner in his younger years, he remained fit and active through a life that took him from Aranui, Christchurch to his first lecturing position in Madrid, Spain, where he met his wife Martha, a lawyer originally from Colombia, before returning to Christchurch in 2006 to be closer to family when raising two children.

“I have always gone running and done weight training … and I started feeling, ‘This is really getting difficult for me’. I noticed it in my breathing, first of all. I noticed it in my heart rate - I had taken a sudden plummet in how I was feeling.”

In October 2021 he went to the ED with chest pain, which turned out to be pneumonia. A CT scan to check that had cleared revealed lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, the body’s germ and disease-fighting immune system.

From 2022 to mid-2024 Watt underwent two complete cycles of chemotherapy - one lot turned him “completely skeletal”, and he almost died from an internal haemorrhage - and an autologous bone marrow transplant.

Richard and Martha Watt at Cytecare Hospital in Bengaluru, India.

Those treatments weren’t successful, however, and he continued to relapse, and ran out of good treatment options. His specialist, Dr Andrew Butler, mentioned CAR T, and told Watt to do some research himself on overseas options.

“We discovered that India had a very successful CAR T programme, and that the Indian scientists were part of the development from scratch of this procedure.”

Watt’s PhD student from India had family in medicine, and began online introductions that led him to fly to Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) in May last year, for CAR T-cell therapy at Cytecare Hospital.

He and Martha stayed in the city for two months. His T cells were harvested and sent to a lab in Mumbai to be genetically modified. Low dose chemotherapy was done before the cells - a yellow soupy mixture - were syringed back into his body over 20 minutes.

CAR T risks serious side effects, including an inflammatory reaction that can cause fever and low blood pressure. Specialists, including a cardiologist and neurologist, crowded around Watt’s bed, along with Martha, and the group talked cricket (India had just qualified for the T20 World Cup final) until they were comfortable that no immediate reactions had occurred.

He stayed in hospital for 10 days for monitoring, then was discharged to his hotel with instructions to return in 11 days time for a PET CT scan.

Scans before (right) and after (left) Richard Watt’s CAR T-cell therapy. Cancerous activity (along with general body activity, especially around the brain, heart, kidneys and genitals) shows as black smudges.

That found no sign of cancer, he and Martha were told in a meeting with Cytecare’s head haematologist, Dr Prasad Narayanan.

“I was in absolutely 100% remission … Dr Prasad said, ‘I think you will not have a problem anymore in your life with lymphoma’.

“It was the end of a big problem, a problem that had the potential to end my life. It’s hard to describe in words - overjoyed, euphoria, I don’t know. We were just stunned by the news.”

For Martha, the results felt miraculous, and swept away years of uncertainty that made looking ahead past her husband’s fight for survival impossible.

“We couldn’t believe it. It was the best moment for us. We started to feel more optimistic, it was really a big change - like life was going to start again.”

Richard Watt wants the Government to make it easier for people to access the CAR T-cell therapy that saved his life.

The time difference meant messages were sent instead of phone calls - to their children, Daniel, 26, and Olivia, 19, and his parents.

“It was great to finally give good news, because there’d been a hell of a lot of bad news up until then.”

Follicular lymphoma is generally not considered curable, but long-term remission is possible. Watt, who is now back teaching mathematics as it is applied to economics and finance, doesn’t think he’s likely to relapse, but will have a check-up scan at the end of June.

“I honestly feel very good. I’m able to exercise, I’m able to live normally, I sleep well, I eat well. I’m a normal person. I can’t speak highly enough of CAR T.”

When he was treated Watt was only the third CAR T patient at Cytecare Hospital, and the first foreigner. He said the team there was first-rate.

“Out in the streets it could be chaotic, but what was important for me was in that hospital, and I could have been in London, New York or Paris.”

The total cost for Watt, including travel and accommodation, was less than $200,000.

He feels incredibly fortunate to have access to money to cover that expense, but has used his retirement savings and taken a loan.

Watt has written an account of his cancer treatment to circulate among other blood cancer patients who may need CAR T-cell therapy. He is doing this story to increase public awareness of the treatment, and to try and spur the Government to make access easier.

That could be through interest-free loans, he says, or by making the cost tax deductible.

“The Government might say to me, ‘Well, you were able to do it’. My answer is that it’s not my case that I want to argue. It’s the case of someone who doesn’t have access to a loan, or a Kiwisaver account that has built-up.”