Duncan and Leslie Searle talk about their experience with Duncan’s cancer diagnosis and the importance of the Molly Appeal at the Dalhousie Medical School on Wednesday afternoon.

Duncan Searle battles the cancer that has invaded his lungs, spinal system and brain with a sharp sense of humour, his faith and the support of the people who love him.

Researchers have taken the fight to the smallest corners of his genetic code.

“I used to play golf in the low 80s but now I’m in the 100s because I keep falling over,” joked Searle, 67, a retired economics teacher who taught for most of his career at Truro’s Cobequid Education Centre.

Besides the dizziness, Searle has endured severe rashes and infections that are the side-effects of the radiation and drug therapy he has undergone since being diagnosed in 2014.

The side-effects of his current medication, Tarisso, the brand name of the cancer drug osimertinib, aren’t as severe as in the past, said Searle in an interview Wednesday with his wife Leslie at the Tupper medical research building at Dalhousie University.

“With the first (drug), I got infections all over me, my head was just a mass of infections, but it was bearable given the alternative,” said the resident of Toney River, Pictou County.

Searle was initially diagnosed with colon cancer after he completed one of the fecal immunological test kits (FIT) that are distributed throughout the province by Cancer Care Nova Scotia. That cancer was caught early and removed before it could spread.

But in followup imaging tests, a radiologist happened to notice shadows in Searle’s lungs and sacrum, a large bone at the base of the spine. It turned out to be Stage 4 non small-cell lung cancer, which had spread to the sacrum.

“It was an absolute shock,” recounted Searle, an athlete and outdoorsman who has never smoked and enjoyed good health until that point. “I didn’t think for a moment I had a problem.”

Searle’s case was handed over to Halifax pathologist Dr. Wenda Greer, who discovered he had a genetic mutation that was treatable with new targeted drug therapies.

The first drug, gefinitib, initially worked well and the cancer started to disappear from Searle’s sacrum and lungs. But in 2016, after he began to suffer intense headaches, it was discovered the cancer had spread to form a web over his brain. He underwent radiation therapy and more genetic analysis, which turned up another mutation.

While lucky doesn’t come to mind as describing this turn of events, Searle said he was fortunate in that this new mutation was treatable with his current drug Tarisso, especially since the drug company AstraZeneca was willing to provide it free on compassionate grounds.

“That blew me away. They couriered the pills to me,” he said. “They’re very expensive pills. About $176 per pill and you take one a day.”

This targeting of genetic mutations has become a leading-edge approach to treating cancer as we better understand the human genome, said Dr. Paola Marignani in an interview in her pathology lab at Dalhousie.

Read the rest of this article at https://web.archive.org/web/20180731111346/http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1507410-cancer-researchers-putting-genetic-mutations-in-their-crosshairs