"Without the funding that went into the research that created CAR T cell therapy, I wouldn’t be here today,” cancer survivor Emily Whitehead told CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper. The University of Pennsylvania sophomore spoke at Friday's Stand Up for Science 2025 rally as part of a call to preserve federal funding for biomedical research. In 2012, Whitehead became the first child treated with CAR T cell therapy, a treatment developed at Penn Medicine that engineers the immune system to fight can