The exam table paper was printed with stars and moons, and Martin Mwita Jr. sat on it with his hair gone and his skin still patchy from chemotherapy. His mother, Jacinta, stood beside him. They were waiting to hear what kind of blood was moving through his body.
"It's almost like you need a drumroll," Dr. Shalini Shenoy told them, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was in the room that day in April 2025. Then came the number: 85% of Martin's red blood cells were normal. He had started at zero. Jacinta threw her hands in the air.
Martin, then 20 and from Bellevue, Nebraska, had been diagnosed with sickle cell disease when he was just days old. The symptoms arrived almost immediately — painful swelling in his hands and feet as an infant, repeated hospitalizations before his first birthday. At around 19 months he suffered strokes and dangerous blood-vessel blockages in his lungs, and spent three weeks in a coma. "We thought we had lost him," Jacinta told WashU Medicine. "But after three weeks in a coma, his eyes opened. It was a miracle!"
Two decades of hospital hallways
Sickle cell disease bends round red blood cells into stiff crescents that clump, jam blood vessels and starve tissue of oxygen. The result is a "pain crisis" — the kind of pain that cancels proms, school days and jobs. By age 11, Martin had made more than 300 visits to health care facilities, according to the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Doctors once told the family he likely wouldn't live past 35. For years he managed with transfusions, then with monthly red blood cell exchanges at Nebraska Medicine.
Then, at the end of 2023, the FDA approved two gene therapies for sickle cell disease in patients 12 and older: Casgevy, from Vertex, and Lyfgenia, from bluebird bio. Martin's care team flagged the news. After research, conversations with his pediatrician and a push to find a center that offered it, he and Jacinta drove to St. Louis — where WashU Medicine and St. Louis Children's Hospital had become the first in the region, and among only a handful of U.S. academic centers, to deliver the treatment.
The therapy is not gentle. Doctors collect a patient's own stem cells, engineer them to make healthy hemoglobin, then wipe out the bone marrow with high-dose chemotherapy before infusing the modified cells back in. Martin got his cells back in March 2025. He lost his hair, lost his immune system for a while, and set himself a goal in recovery: a six-mile walk through the hallways near his hospital room. He did it. Roughly six weeks after the infusion, in May, the transplant team lined the corridor and cheered as he was discharged.
"Absolutely worth it"
By last summer he was back home in Bellevue at 21, flipping through a scrapbook friends and family had assembled for him, meeting buddies outdoors for golf and pickleball, hair growing back — and, for the first time in his life, no sickle cell pain. Shenoy cleared him to live normally: ride a bike, run long distances, go outside in brutal cold or heat, all things that once risked a crisis.
In a report published Aug. 10, 2026, by the health program Aging Untold and carried by Gray television stations, Martin said his follow-up testing showed his body nearly free of sickled cells. "Seeing the results of it, like what it actually means for me to be cured of sickle cell after 20 years, I think it was absolutely worth it looking back," he said.
An estimated 100,000 Americans live with sickle cell disease, most of them Black, and about 2,000 U.S. babies are born with it each year. The therapy isn't right for everyone, and it carries real long-term risks. But Shenoy has said plainly what Martin's numbers represent: a cure that no one could have imagined a decade ago — and a young man in Nebraska whose blood finally stopped hurting him.
