JoAnn DeCesaris remembers a maddening trip to the emergency room with her husband, Geaton, a few years ago. He was terminally ill with lung cancer, and his condition had worsened. But the initial response from an attending nurse was less than sympathetic—in fact, JoAnn recalls, the nurse’s tone was accusatory. “She said, ‘Well, have you quit smoking yet?’ And she was very arrogant about it,” JoAnn recalls. “I told her, no, he hadn’t quit, because he had never started smoking in the first place.”
David Sidransky believes genetic testing
could be the key to helping cancer
patients avoid unnecessary or ineffective
chemotherapy or radiation treatments.
Of the 200,000 people diagnosed with lung cancer annually, about 15 percent are nonsmokers. When Geaton DeCesaris Jr. died on April 15, 2006, his wife and their five daughters became determined to spread awareness about nonsmoking-related lung cancers and to support research and treatments for the disease through their family’s DeCesaris Foundation. Their latest beneficiary is David Sidransky, director of head and neck cancer research in the Department of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery.
A diagnosis of lung cancer in a man who didn’t smoke wasn’t the only thing that set Geaton DeCesaris’ experience apart from other oncology patients. His medical care, too, was unusual, with Sidransky playing a unique role, not as his physician, but as a combination of medical team leader and chief researcher.
Sidransky left his clinical practice years ago to focus solely on oncology research. His work on the molecular makeup of cancers brought him to the attention of Geaton, who wanted to take advantage of any treatment options available. With the family urgently requesting his help, Sidransky agreed to orchestrate Geaton’s care and to perform molecular testing on his tumors in hopes of determining which treatment options were most likely to succeed.
Because of the experimental nature of Sidransky’s work, however, the tests were not covered by insurance. And, while the DeCesaris family was able to pay privately, it was an arrangement that most families could not afford. “Testing the tumors was very important to us, and it’s important to the future care of cancer patients because not all cancers are going to react to the same chemotherapies,” JoAnn DeCesaris says. “It saved my husband from getting a treatment that not only wouldn’t have worked, but would have just made him sick. Most people don’t have that option.”
Together with Sidransky, the DeCesaris family hopes that further research and discovery will eventually make molecular testing of cancer a more accessible standard of care and allow patients to receive the best treatments that suit their individual conditions.
“It’s very expensive and not incredibly available,” JoAnn says. “But if they can get this down to a science, it would be more affordable and performed more frequently than it is now. And when they have this down pat, I think it’s going to be a huge breakthrough in cancer care and save a lot of people from a lot of extra pain.”
In the meantime, while they wait for molecular testing to become a norm in oncology care, the family hopes to spread awareness that not all lung cancer patients are current or former smokers. And, JoAnn says, even if the cancer was caused by smoking, all patients deserve the same degree of respect, compassion and sympathy. “A diagnosis of cancer and then having to go through chemotherapy is already so hard,” she says. No one, she continues, should have to deal with being blamed for their condition.
“Even people in health care sometimes treat lung cancer patients differently. But no matter what the cause of someone’s illness, they should still be treated with dignity. That’s a huge issue for me.”
