Competitive swimmer grateful for new lung cancer treatment

Most mornings, you’ll find Bruce Dunbar powering through a workout with the Westchester, New York, Master’s Swim Club.

Dunbar was a high school all-American and captain of the Princeton swim team. Now at 52, swimming is good for his body and his mind.

“The truth is, it’s a chance to think about what the day has in store, what life has in store,” he said.

Two years ago, his life was flipped upside down. What doctors first thought was asthma or pneumonia was finally diagnosed as stage-four lung cancer. It had spread to his spine and his brain.

“As it turns out, I had 26 lesions in my brain,” said Dunbar.

He never smoked. His doctors determined he had a gene mutation driving the cancer.

“Bruce wound up having something called an ALK rearrangement, which is a mutation, different parts of the chromosome fused together, and fortunately, that has amazing drugs now,” said thoracic surgeon with Weill Cornell Medicine and NY-Presbyterian, Brendon Stiles, MD.

In fact, just one month before Dunbar was diagnosed, the FDA approved Alecensa and his oncologist prescribed it. Four pills, twice a day.

Now more than 20 months later, Dunbar has just three tumors in his brain. The tumor in his lung is only one-tenth of what it used to be.

“In November of 2017 when I was diagnosed, I wasn’t sure I was going to live, let alone get back in a pool again,” he said. Back swimming and competing as long as he can.

Doctors say eventually the drug will stop working and the cancer will re-grow.
The hope is that the targeted therapy works long enough for researchers to refine the next generation of the drug, or add another treatment, like immunotherapy, to keep Dunbar going.