Lu Yong, who has a slow-growing blood and bone marrow cancer and inspired the 2018 blockbuster Dying to Survive, has begun reducing his medication and hopes to stop taking it completely within three months.
The acclaimed film is based on Lu’s experience. He has chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) and helped patients across China obtain affordable, life-saving generic drugs from India, but was prosecuted by Chinese authorities for selling “fake drugs”.
Before his diagnosis, 58-year-old Lu was a textiles trader in Jiangsu province in eastern China. Diagnosed with CML in 2002, he took Gleevec, a patented drug made by Novartis, for the first few years.