![]() ![]() The weeks where toxic drugs were administered were rough, but I never really heard Tim complain. Meanwhile, high-dose chemotherapy was started-one week on, one week off. A few of these misspelled proteins might make good targets for an activated immune system, should traditional therapy fail-as it almost certainly would. Those assurances having been provided, he came to NIH for an operation to capture some of the cancer tissue so its specific and unique DNA mutations could be identified. Tim was clear-eyed about the likelihood of benefit, but he wanted assurance that whatever happened, the medical research team would learn from it and be able to advance the protocol for the next time and the time after that. Tim and Kathy, his partner in life, love, and faith, weighed the pros and cons and elected to sign up for an NIH clinical trial that had shown some initial promise for advanced breast and gall bladder cancers but for which there was so far very limited experience with pancreatic cancer. On the horizon, however, are new approaches called “precision oncology”-characterizing the unique DNA mutations in the patient’s cancer in exquisite detail and then teaching the body’s immune system to recognize the masked intruders. Chemotherapy can sometimes help pancreatic cancer, but only for a time. As a physician-scientist and the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), I reached out to help him and Kathy sort through the options for interventions. Though we didn’t completely agree on everything, Tim became my most significant spiritual mentor.īut now I was in a different role. ![]() In the early years of BioLogos, he agreed to cohost intensely interesting and productive meetings in New York, where deep discussions about the complementarity of science and Christian faith took place. Thus began a three-year journey that explored the cutting edge of experimental cancer therapeutics-but more significantly, the courageous approach to terminal illness by a man of deep faith. With current therapy, life expectancy is less than a year. The subject line of the email from Kathy Keller made my heart sink: “Tim’s got pancreatic cancer.” The diagnosis was stage IV.
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