JOHN HANNA, AP Political Writer

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Employee turnover at Kansas prisons has increased over the past five years, and the state’s corrections secretary and legislators agree that officers’ pay must rise if the state hopes to end a problem that’s now seen as a threat to public safety.

But a legislative committee’s endorsement last week of higher wages for uniformed officers raises potentially contentious questions about how to pay for them.

Republican Gov. Sam Brownback has ruled out further tax increases since he and the GOP-dominated Legislature raised sales and cigarette taxes in July to close an earlier shortfall.

Brownback’s stance — and many Republican lawmakers’ lack of interest in another tax debate — could force the Legislature into considering spending cuts elsewhere, perhaps even in aid to public schools, to boost pay for corrections officers.

HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) — Kansas advocates for the poor say they are searching for sites to provide more summer meals to children.

During a regional Summer Meals Summit in Hutchinson this week, advocates said the state provides seven free summer lunches for every 100 schoolchildren who are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunches at school. A federal effort called Summer Food Service Program funds the meals.

The Hutchinson News reports only Oklahoma placed lower than Kansas in the number of meals it provides.

The Hutchinson meeting was one of five summer meals meetings held across the state recently.

Participants said transportation to meal sites is a major obstacle, particularly in rural areas. But others said providing the free meals is one of the most rewarding things a town can do for its citizens.

Great Bend Post

GREAT BEND -When news came out last week that Dwight Young from the Center for Counseling and Consultation in Great Bend had sexual harassment allegations against him, most people assumed the women that filed the lawsuit were seeking action against Young.

Two women filed a federal lawsuit with reports of the former executive director demonstrating “serial predatory sexual behavior.”

The current executive director of the Center, Doug McNett, says the lawsuit is directed at the Center and not Mr. Young.

“The lawsuit is just against the center,” said McNett.” That makes it unique in terms of what we can and can’t say. We have an obligation to protect Mr. Young’s personnel records as well as these two individuals.”

One former and one current woman filed the lawsuit with representation from a Wichita lawyer. The civil case begins in the 1980s with reports of Young allegedly asking staff members about sexual habits, giving inappropriate gifts, having inappropriate conversations, and belittling women staff members.

McNett wanted to reassure the public that the mental health provider in Great Bend is operational throughout the lawsuit. “This lawsuit won’t impact the financial integrity of the agency,” he said. “We have professional liability insurance so the lawsuit will not impact or day to day or long term operations.”

The lawsuit also goes after McNett and The Center for Counseling and Consultation Board for hiring McNett as Young’s replacement instead of hiring one of the women from the lawsuit that was also qualified.
Young resigned as the executive director shortly after a local attorney was hired to investigate the claims against Young.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — Student protests at the University of Missouri over how racially charged incidents have been handled by school leaders have ramped up over the semester and reached a peak with 32 black football players now refusing to participate in team activities until the president is removed.

The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950 GP pic.twitter.com/fMHbPPTTKl

— Coach Gary Pinkel (@GaryPinkel) November 8, 2015

It’s the latest controversy at the state’s flagship university, following the removal of graduate students’ health care subsidies and an end to university contracts with a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Several members of the football team tweeted the team’s statement Saturday night.

Campus groups and Jonathan Butler, a black graduate student nearly a week into a hunger strike, have criticized university President Tim Wolfe over the handling of issues of race and discrimination. Wolfe met with Butler and student groups last week.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will decide whether convicted sex offenders must update their status on the federal sex offender registry after moving to a foreign country.

The justices agreed Friday to resolve a split among lower courts that reached different outcomes in the cases of two men — one who lived in Kansas City, Kansas, and another who lived in Kansas City, Missouri.

The court will hear an appeal from Lester Nichols, a Kansas man who moved to the Philippines after his release from prison in 2012 without updating his registration. A federal appeals court in Denver upheld his conviction for violating the law.

But a federal appeals court in St. Louis said a convicted sex offender from Missouri did not have to register after he also moved to the Philippines.

By DAN MARGOLIES

Carl Adams has an aggressive form of blood cancer that has resisted multiple attempts to treat it through chemotherapy. So in

September, the 47-year-old father of two young daughters traveled halfway around the world with his family from their native Australia to The University of Kansas Cancer Center. There, a clinical trial is underway to test a therapy that harnesses the power of a patient’s own immune system to attack malignant cells.

It’s called CAR T-cell therapy: removing T cells, a type of white blood cell, from a patient’s body, genetically engineering them to recognize and attack the patient’s tumors, and putting the T cells back into the patient.

On Tuesday, after a traffic delay caused by the Kansas City Royals parade, Adams’ engineered T cells arrived back in Kansas City, where they were reinfused in his body. The whole procedure took less than five minutes.

“They’re like super cells that are going to attack the cancer and we’ve got plenty in here for them to chase and chomp, so we’re hoping they do their job over the next couple of days,” Adams said minutes before a nurse injected him with the T cells.

Even if it works, his doctor says he’ll still need a stem cell transplant from a matching donor. And there are known side effects, including fever and low blood pressure. But already, with three patients having received CAR T-cell therapy at KU, referrals are coming from as far afield as Portugal and Canada as well as the U.S. The second patient to receive the treatment at KU, a 27-year old Atchison, Kansas, mother of two, is said to be doing well.

Although lots of cancer treatments have been hailed as “blockbusters” only to disappoint, CAR T-cell therapy (CAR stands for chimeric antigen receptors) has generated lots of excitement among researchers. Unlike chemotherapy and radiation, which kill “good” and “bad” cells alike, CAR T-cell targets the disease by zeroing in on specific proteins found on the surfaces of the malignant cells.

“What I can tell you, as someone who’s been taking care of leukemias and lymphomas and transplant patients for 26 years now, this is the most hopeful I’ve ever been in my entire career,” says Dr. Joseph McGuirk, Adams’ physician and the director of

blood cancers and stem cell transplants at KU Cancer Center.

Out of options

Adams has an extremely aggressive form of cancer called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, or DLBCL. Among adults, it’s the most common form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a group of blood cancers. Adams had tumors in his chest, abdomen and bladder.

Diagnosed in Australia in April, Adams says he underwent about five rounds of chemotherapy before, as he puts it, “we had to think of what we had to do next.”

Out of options in Australia, he decided to seek treatment in the United States. So Adams, a business consultant for the global consulting firm KPMG; his wife Stacey; and their two daughters, ages 11 and 6, uprooted themselves from their home in Perth and made tracks for Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Doctors there pointed him to KU Cancer Center, where Phase II of the CAR T-cell clinical trial was underway to determine whether the treatment is effective and to evaluate its safety.

Adams and his wife found themselves a furnished apartment just north of the Country Club Plaza, enrolled their girls in school and embarked on the medical odyssey that culminated with the infusion of his engineered T cells on Tuesday.

But because the chemotherapy had suppressed his T cells, first there was a period of watchful waiting until he’d regained a sufficient number to be extracted. Once that happened, his T cells were shipped to a lab where they were genetically modified to create special receptors on their surface, the chimeric antigen receptors from which the therapy takes its name.

The engineered T cells were then grown to number in the billions. After that, they were shipped back to KU in a canister that was cooled to sub-zero temperatures to keep them preserved. At that point, the cells, a cloudy mixture amounting to no more than a few teaspoons in volume, were injected into Adams’ bloodstream.

By Tuesday night, Adams had begun running a fever, the result of his T cells releasing cytokines, small proteins activated as the T cells attack the malignant cells.

“These T cells can be so potent in releasing these molecules, so powerful against the cancer, that you can have a bad case of the flu times 10,” McGuirk says.

The symptoms are usually manageable, although the second patient at KU to receive the therapy ended up in the intensive care unit for several days.

“She did O.K., and overwhelmingly, patients do O.K., but it can be quite dramatic,” McGuirk says.

‘Remarkable remission rates’

The Phase II clinical trial at KU comes after early-stage trials at the University of Pennsylvania that demonstrated CAR T-cell therapy’s effectiveness in patients with advanced acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL. In many cases, patients went into complete remission and have remained cancer-free.

“All of these trials are treating patients who have far-advanced and refractory or resistant disease,” says Dr. David Porter, one of the leaders of the study at Penn. “They’re no longer responding to conventional therapies and many of these patients have no other treatment options. And this immune therapy approach, using these T cells that are gene modified to attack their cancer, has resulted in really rather remarkable remission rates.”

Penn licensed its technology to engineer and grow the T cells to Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant that is sponsoring the clinical trial at KU. The hope is that manufacturing can be developed on a scale sufficient to make it practical to carry out immunotherapy on large populations of patients.

“People used to think that cell therapy was so personalized and so individualized that it was never going to be practical on any large scale, but I think those manufacturing issues have been worked out,” Porter says.
Even if the therapy works, however, McGuirk says Adams and the other patients enrolled in KU’s trial will still need stem cell transplants from matching donors. While CAR T-cell therapy may prove curative, it’s simply too soon to tell.

“Until we have more data and we know that it’s potentially curative, the insurance policy is to transplant them,” McGuirk says. “Because we know that that has a clear-cut, defined chance of curing their disease.”

Indeed, researchers caution that while early results of CAR T-cell therapy have been promising, the clinical trials are still in their early phases and large groups of patients have yet to be treated. And while KU is bearing the cost of treatment for enrollees in the clinical trial, if the therapy does prove successful, it undoubtedly will end up being very expensive.

“What I can tell you from our own experience – and I’m so excited about the potential of this therapy to cure patients with terrible cancers and I think it has very broad applications – I think it’s going to be very costly,” McGuirk says. “But to come up with a number, I’d just be pulling it out of thin air.”

That said, McGuirk calls the personalized treatments that CAR T-cell therapy represents “astounding in their potential.”

“We’re at the beginning of a remarkable revolution and we’re going to see an incredible story unfold in the next decade,” he says. “I’m confident that there’s now enough science behind this and experience that that’s what’s coming down the line.”

Porter is just as emphatic.

“We have patients now over five years from their treatment in remission, which is just unheard of for other types of treatment,” he says. “So I really do believe it is a breakthrough and some of the hype is warranted.”

Dan Margolies, editor of the Heartland Health Monitor team. You can reach him on Twitter @DanMargolies.

TOPEKA – A Kansas man was injured in an accident just after 8p.m. on Saturday in Shawnee County.

The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2002 Hyundai Santa Fe driven by Tyler Dean Johnson, 23, Topeka, was southbound on Kansas 4 three miles northeast of Topeka.

The SUV swerved to miss a deer, ran off the roadway and rolled onto its top into the east ditch.

Johnson was transported to Stormont Vail.

He was properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the KHP.

CONWAY SPRINGS, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas teacher will return to work Monday after being on leave for showing a controversial anti-bullying film to his students.

Conway Springs school officials said Friday that Tom Leahy will be allowed back in the classroom with some safeguards in place. The Wichita Eagle reports Superintendent Clay Murphy would not discuss details of the safeguards and said the district would have no further comment on the matter.

Leahy is a social studies teacher at Conway Springs Middle School. He was placed on leave in mid-October after he showed students “Love Is All You Need,” a short film that depicts a fictional world in which heterosexual children are bullied by homosexual classmates.

Leahy also told the Eagle that he would no longer comment on the controversy.

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — Three environmental groups want Lawrence to reduce the use of plastic grocery bags by imposing a ban or fining shoppers who use them.

The Lawrence Journal-World reports that the Sustainability Action Network, the Sierra Wakarusa Group and the Lawrence Environmental Teams United for Sustainability are taking their proposal to a city advisory board next week.

California and cities and counties across the nation have already instituted plastic bag bans. Some Kansas communities have considered the issue, although no bans have been instituted so far.

Thad Holcombe, of the Sierra group, says it’s time to stop talking about the issue and discuss some actions.

The item is on the advisory board’s agenda for its Wednesday meeting.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas school administrators want lawmakers to again consider raising the cap on the amount retired workers can earn to help alleviate staffing shortages.

Lawmakers during the last legislative session changed a program called Working After Retirement. It gives limited authority for employers in the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System to hire retired workers who are drawing a pension if younger workers cannot fill certain jobs.

Under the bill enacted this year, the earnings cap was raised to $25,000 starting July 1, 2016.

Two groups of Kansas school administrators told the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Pensions, Investments and Benefits Wednesday that some districts, particularly in rural areas, continue to struggle to recruit qualified teachers.

The Lawrence Journal-World reports  the administrators say the cap should be raised beyond $25,000.