Transcript

 As the Chairman of Fighting Chance for over 20 years, I’ve heard plenty of stories and anecdotes - from the patients we’ve counseled - about their cancer journeys. After all, Fighting Chance staff have provided over 5,000 counseling sessions during our time serving cancer patients, family and caregivers on the East End of Long Island.I’m often asked, “Duncan, what’s the one thing that you did not fully appreciate about a patient’s cancer journey?”

A few years into my experience at Fighting Chance, I had an answer . . . but did not speak about it for many years thereafter. I, first, wanted to see if my conclusions remained the same, year after year, as I gained an ever greater exposure to how people cope with the disease.

Well, after these many years, the answer has, indeed, remained the same: HOPE. This is a concept wholly separate from the scans patients get, the drugs and treatments administered to them. I have personally witnessed the power of their HOPE. 

I would put it this way: “Even in the case of Stage 4 cancers, where there is Hope, there cannot be total darkness.” 

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Pancreatic Cancer - The Undruggable One

Ben Sasse was not your typical pancreatic cancer patient. He had been a US Senator from Nebraska for one term. Then, President of the University of Florida. He is known to be an idealistic and middle-of-road politician. An endangered species.

Then one day, he felt a soreness in his back. He went to the University’s top doctor who did a full body scan and found a pancreatic cancer tumor. Additionally, the cancer had spread and “seeded” tumors in his lung and elsewhere.

Ben was being treated at MD Anderson in Houston, Texas and his docs said he only had a few months to live, absent a miracle. Ben responded by asking his doctor, “You’ve been an oncologist for 25+ years. Ever seen a miracle?” To which his doctor replied, “Yes I have, Mr. Sasse.” 

“I see them in clinical trials where a group of patients all die during the trial, except one. This one guy is still standing, even though science says he should be dead . . . just like everyone around him.”

Sasse was rapidly digesting the data points and asked the oncologist: “So, are there any clinical trials at this hospital with medication that might give a stiff arm to my pancreatic cancer?” The two doctors leading the treatment for Sasse’s cancer - Dr. Wolff and Dr. Pant - said there actually were two current trials at MD Anderson. For Sasse, they selected the trial with a new drug that seemed most promising. It was an experimental oral drug called Daraxonrasib - a targeted therapy designed to block mutant RAS proteins that drive the disease. (Ras proteins: H-Ras, K-Ras, N-Ras function as molecular switches, regulating cell proliferation, differentiation, and survival.) The hope was that this trial drug would be “the miracle” that Sasse was looking for. 

At the time hhe joined the trial, the duration between diagnosis and death for pancreatic cancer was most often 3 to 6 months with a hard stop. As of late April 2026, Ben Sasse was still alive - and it had been about 14 months since his diagnosis.

At the heart of pancreatic cancer is a gene known as “KRAS.” KRAS is part of a group known as "oncogenes” because of their cancer-causing properties. For example, the KRAS gene is found in90% of all pancreatic cancer. KRAS also appears in roughly 40% of all colon cancers and 25% of lung cancers. It was pretty clear: for a drug to work against pancreatic cancer, it had to shrink (and eventually eliminate) the array of tumors attributable to the mischievous ways of the KRAS gene.

Sasses’s trial drug: Daraxonrasib was the “BMW” of cancer drugs. A sort of “best of the best.” 

As evidence the drug was routinely eliminating 40% of the tumors attributable to KRAS. During an interview with Mr. Sasse, in March 2026, he said his dosage of the drug had eliminated over 75% of his tumors and he was alive 14 months since diagnosis - more than twice as long as was expected.

A miracle? Or just Good Science at work? You decide.

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Change of Scene . . . Jimmy’s Story

Let’s travel from the gleaming Texas towers of MD Anderson in the 2020s - back in time almost 80 years, and across the country, to the dirt roads of Northern Maine.

We see a middle-aged man driving a red truck with a child - about 6 years old - riding in the back of the truck, all bundled up. It’s winter in Maine where temperatures routinely go below 0 degrees. After 6 hours of driving and chilled to the bone, the boy and his Dad arrive in downtown Boston at the medical clinic run by an energetic young doctor: Sidney Farber, MD. It is 1948. (Some 30 years later, when Farber passes on, the building will be re-christened as the “Dana-Farber Cancer Center.”)

The young boy, Einar Gustafson, better known as “Jimmy” had been diagnosed with childhood Leukemia. He came to Dr. Farber who was known to have had small successes in curing the disease with large doses of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy was discovered during World War II when researchers investigating chemical warfare agents realized that nitrogen mustard, a derivative of mustard gas, severely reduced white blood cell counts. Yale pharmacologists Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman hypothesized this compound could destroy rapidly dividing cancer cells.

Farber isolated the cancer-killing agent - that was integral to mustard gas - and ended up with a new highly lethal drug for treating cancer.Now Farber needed “proof of principle” that the new chemo drug could a) kill cancer cells, but b) not kill the patient in the process.

The word spread. Dr. Farber may have discovered a drug with cancer-killing properties that still let the patient survive - at least sometimes.

Jimmy’s father signed up his son for the Farber treatment. The treatment required a visit to the hospital once every three weeks for a new dosage. This continued for several months. Most of the children in the Therapy did not fare well. Most of them, in fact, died after a couple of 

chemo infusions. But not Jimmy. Somehow he was able to endure the side effects of the treatment as well as the grind of traveling back and forth from Northern Maine to Boston, over and over again.

Some would say it was a miracle that Jimmy survived his battle with Cancer. He ended up farming, with a wife and three children of his own. To his family, his cure was clearly a miracle. And for the pursuit of science and cancer medicine, opening doors to many more “miracles.”

A fund was created in Jimmy’s name and for over 75 years, the “Jimmy Fund” has advanced Dana-Farber’s mission of providing exceptional patient care and conducting lifesaving research that benefits cancer patients, worldwide.

Interestingly though, until very recently, the real identity of Jimmy remained a mystery. Early on his name had been protected for privacy purposes. And once cured, Jimmy went on to live a normal, quiet life. 

Of course people wondered: What had happened to Jimmy? Many assumed he had eventually died from his disease. But, In 1997, his sister wrote to the Jimmy Fund to say her brother was still alive. The letter was first misplaced, but eventually found by a fund official who wrote back that the charity had no record of his real name or what had happened to him. Soon after that, Jimmy whose real name was Einar Gustafson, got in touch with the Dana-Farber rep and easily proved he was the famous patient. 

One of the proofs was this: In 1948, when Jimmy was a patient at the hospital, members of the Boston Red Sox baseball team visited his hospital room. Among them was Ted Williams, still in the middle of his Hall of Fame career. Ted had been thoughtful enough to bring one of his baseball jerseys for Jimmy. On the back of his jersey, it said “Williams” and on the shirt, Ted had written “to my pal Jimmy from Ted Williams. Einar had kept this memento for all these years. Upon seeing the Ted Williams jersey, the Hospital rep said: “I think we found the real Jimmy . . . 

and I think this might be a MIRACLE.”