Credit: Cindy Chew
When Robert Bruce, of El Dorado, Calif., was diagnosed in March 2011 with stage-4 melanoma, he already had tumors on his head, lungs, ribs and lymph nodes.
Bruce said his cancer wasn’t a case of his body betraying him, but actually the reverse: “I betrayed my own body.”
“I was a type-A personality, always stressed, and stress – as we all know now — is one of the biggest inhibitors to a healthy immune system,” he said. “And, I’d always been one to go out to into the sun and tan. My daughter would say, ‘Daddy, put on sunscreen,’ and I would say, ‘No, it’s just skin cancer. If something happens, they could just cut it out.’ I was an idiot.”
By the time his wife noticed a nasty-looking mole on his back and persuaded him to show it to his doctor, the cancer had metastasized throughout his whole body.
Bruce endured a brutal round of biochemotherapy, a combination of traditional chemotherapy with immunotherapy. The treatment didn’t seem to make a difference, and doctors gave him six to nine months to live.
He began reading about a new generation of promising immune response drugs and was accepted for Daud’s trial of the PD-1 antibody at UCSF.
“At eight weeks, I got my first scan, and it showed 20 to 30 percent reduction in my tumor load,” Bruce said. “After almost a year of bad, bad stuff with no good news ever, all of a sudden, they were shrinking.”
His muscles and bones ache and hurt from the treatment, but compared to the debilitating biochemotherapy, Bruce said, “this has been a piece of cake.”
Every two weeks he watches his tumors decrease, and now they are virtually nonexistent.
“I feel like a kid on Christmas morning,” he said. “I’m 60 years old, and I was already looking at what I was going to miss out on – the grandkids, all those kinds of things.
“I’ve prayed about this, and initially it wasn’t just for a cure, but I asked for peace and for hope. What any cancer patient asks for is really that hope, that if this drug doesn’t do it, maybe it will keep me here long enough to find the next drug that will.”