Research, care and the search for a cure

Dr. Steven Schuster, medical director of UCHealth’s oncology research program in Northern Colorado, gets a twinkle in his eye when he says the “C word” — no, not “cancer,” but “cure.”

He and a team of 24 researchers are getting closer, but no one wants to jinx it — least of all one of UCHealth’s star patients, Clay Drake.

For the past nine years, Drake, a Windsor resident and a former banker, has battled valiantly with his multiple-myeloma blood cancer diagnosis.

“My cancer has a tendency to change, it’s really tricky, devious even,” said Drake. “It will find ways to figure out how to stay in your system.”

He’s been through a variety of cancer treatments that worked for a while, but the myeloma kept coming back. He got a stem cell transplant in 2016, then later a donor stem-cell transplant, which gave him a year before his myeloma showed up again.

In 2022, he underwent  another promising treatment, in which “they pull your stem cells out, send them to a lab, re-engineer them to detect and fight the cancer and put them back into you, and you’re in the hospital for 10 days,” Drake said.

Last June, UCHealth’s cancer research team put Drake in a new research study in which the body’s immune system is used to fight the cancer. “It’s designed to search and destroy the cancer,” Drake said. “It’s like a Game of Thrones war of worker bees and generals (T-cells).”

Multiple myeloma, for now, at least, is not curable, it’s just manageable. Local researchers and caregivers are working to change that.

At any given time, there are between 40 and 60 cancer research studies ongoing in the 25-year-old UCHealth Oncology Clinical Research Department. 

Schuster is most excited about the program’s bispecific antibody therapy, which is directed toward blood cancers such as multiple myeloma, or cancer of the plasma cells that exist in the bone marrow, which normally help the body fight off infections.

This type of therapy is only studied on blood cancers at present, but there is a strong chance it can eventually be moved into cancers with tumors. “Now we’re starting to get data that looks like this is a win for solid tumors too,” he said. 

Still, Schuster remains hesitant to utter that all-important “C word.”

“We are hopeful they’re cured, we’re currently saying they are in stringent complete remission. They’re on (the drugs) as maintenance for one to two months. We do continue them because we don’t have enough time or data to prove they’re cured yet.”

Regardless, Drake is grateful for all UCHealth has done over the past nine years.

“When I got diagnosed it was aggressive myeloma, they said you’ve got five years so live your life. Here I am nine years later, and I’m living a reasonably normal life. It’s really an amazing bit of science they’re trying to figure out.”

Navigating a winding road

On the website for MD Anderson Cancer Center, the word “cancer” has a red line through it, signifying the center’s slogan, “Making cancer history.”

But the road to recovery is a winding and bumpy one, and it often starts with a patient visit to a primary care physician.

“Navigating a health-care system is not always a chip shot,” AdventHealth Avista Hospital’s chief medical officer Dr. Lief Sorensen said, but primary-care teams serve as the “true quarterbacks,” passing patient information off to caregivers in other departments. 

If primary caregivers are the hospital’s quarterbacks, navigators play the role of coach, shepherding patients through the process from diagnosis to recovery. 

One of the “worst things that a patient can hear is, ‘You have cancer.’ With the shock and concern that they have, sometimes they’re not hearing the messages right there in the moment. So the navigator steps in and helps them throughout the entire process,” Intermountain Health chief operating officer Steven Hankins said.

Navigators are the patient’s “hand to hold,” Intermountain Good Samaritan Hospital cancer program director Shari Oakland Schulze said, and “help the patient walk through the steps that need to happen to get them to the providers, to the tests, to the different resources that they need.”

Doctors, nurses and patients can’t defeat cancer on their own. That takes community-wide support.

For example, Susan Pratt, who along with husband Ken Pratt were driving forces behind Longmont’s growth through real-estate sales and development, vowed 40 years ago that no person would have to leave Longmont to receive cancer treatment.

Their $310,000 donation helped create the Hope Cancer Care Center at Longmont United Hospital, named after Susan Pratt’s mother, Hope Arlene Marti – well before Ken Pratt died of cancer in 1995.

Cutting-edge cancer-care technology

Caregivers at local hospitals use the latest cutting-edge technology such as robotics,  linear accelerators and artificial intelligence-enhanced X-ray devices to help battle cancer.

“This (AI software) goes through the radiology report and pulls it out and puts patients into sort of a registry,” said Dr. Diana Breyer, a pulmonologist who serves as UCHealth’s chief medical officer for Northern Colorado.

“So this allows a system where for most patients we’re interacting with them before the primary even has to get involved,” she said. “Then (doctors) only start getting (notified) if the patient isn’t following up the way that it was recommended.”
Robots used in a surgical setting provide doctors with a “different level of precision,” Sorensen said, allowing surgeons to access and treat hard-to-reach tumors. The technology enables smaller envisions, shortening time under the knife and in the recovery process.

Building on success

In recent years, area hospitals have expanded their cancer-care capacity, or are now in the process of doing so.

The Banner’s McKee McKee Medical Center in Loveland launched a 13,500-square-foot, $7.9 million expansion in 2019 that included more clinical space and a dedicated pharmacy. That project expanded the chemotherapy and infusion area, updating it to a pod design for more privacy and support for patients and families.

At Avista, expanding oncology services is “a key part” of AdventHealth’s efforts to build a new, larger hospital in the Redtail Ridge business district, Sorensen said. “The plans for the new hospital include clinical oncology, a higher-level infusion center and all of the specialties with the latest and greatest innovations.”