U.S. college student battles his own cancer

Josh Sommer waits for the test tubes to warm up to 37 degrees Celsius, for the centrifuge to spin them around, then for the cells inside to settle properly to the bottom. Last year, one batch took three excruciating months to get right.

This cinderblock laboratory inside a Veterans Administration hospital research building is not where the 20-year-old Duke University junior expected to spend much of his college career. He came to Duke to study environmental engineering, not biology.

But for what Josh now needs, a million things need to be done, and running these cultures is one of them. So he is here, growing and nurturing cells, one small but vital part of an effort to help others understand the genetic mechanisms that make them misfire.

So he is patient, because a mistake could set the project back a week, and thousands of lives are at stake.

One of them is his.

Freshman year starts blissfully, Josh surrounded by new, smart friends. But then terrible headaches start over Christmas break. Josh undergoes testing before returning to school.

His mother, Simone, gets the phone call at her home in Greensboro. A doctor herself, she takes the news from a fellow physician calmly, clinically. Then she hangs up and goes to pieces, as any parent would.

She gets in the car and drives to campus with Josh’s dog Dassi. “I’m in Durham and we need to talk,” Simone tells her son when she reaches him on his cell phone.

He is puzzled, then remembers the recent MRI. His heart thumps. When he meets her at the dorm, she is holding back tears.

A cancer diagnosis is devastating, whatever the type. Nearly 220,000 new cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, 178,000 of breast cancer.

Chordoma — the cancer Josh learns he has — is a one-in-a million disease. Just 300 people get the terrible news each year, not even one per day. It strikes all ages, at different spots along the spinal column. The tumors can be removed, but the cancer is relentless. Chemotherapy doesn’t work. Life expectancy is around seven years.

The MRI shows Josh’s tumor is in a tough spot, in a bone inside his skull. It extends onto his brain stem and wraps around several arteries. There are two surgeries, then weeks of hospital recovery. He and Simone pass the time reading whatever they can about the disease.

There isn’t much. The massive apparatus of medical research — pharmaceutical companies, foundations, universities, government agencies — is utilitarian. High-prevalence diseases are at the front of the line, rare ones like chordoma usually at the back.

But then, a stroke of good fortune. It turns out that the only researcher in the country with a grant to study chordoma happens to be at Duke, working in a VA lab across the street from campus. They meet Michael Kelley in his office. They talk about the research and where it might go next. Kelley says he’s willing to proceed, but he’ll need things like equipment and staff to work in his lab.

Well, Josh says, you can put me to work.

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