From left: Dr. Erica Tsang, from Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Kathy and Dan Murphy, Dr. Faiyaz Notta from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and Dr. Beatriz Anton Pascual, a fellow at Princess Margaret, at an event at the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation in Toronto on Friday.Max Kopanygin/Supplied
The organizers: Dan, Kathy, Grace and Maeve Murphy
The pitch: Raising $1.2-million and climbing
The cause: Funding precision cancer treatment
Dan Murphy lost all hope when he was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in 2023.
The cancer had spread to his liver and Mr. Murphy thought he probably only had months to live. “These are things that you never, ever forget,” Mr. Murphy, 55, recalled from the family’s home in Toronto. “There was really no hope.”
He’d been told a few weeks earlier that a tumour on his pancreas could be removed through surgery. Just before the operation, Mr. Murphy’s wife, Kathy, inquired about genetic testing because his mother had died from breast cancer, which is linked to the same type of genetic mutation as pancreatic cancer. That led to an appointment with Dr. Erica Tsang, an oncologist at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.
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The results of Mr. Murphy’s genetic testing made him a perfect candidate for a new type of treatment called precision medicine, which tailors chemotherapy and medication to an individual’s genetic mutations.
In their first meeting, Dr. Tsang told Mr. Murphy, “What we’re going to focus on for you is quality of life.”
“That really stuck with me. Ever since then I thought maybe I could live with cancer,” he said.
Precision medicine, he explained, involves “treating people’s cancers at the molecular level, at your cellular level, rather than the location of the cancer.”
He didn’t have the surgery and embarked on six months of chemotherapy. After that, he began taking a drug based on a map of his genome. The pills, which he still takes twice a day, attack the cells that have been damaged by chemotherapy to ensure they remain inactive.
“I’m doing pretty well,” he said. “You would not know looking at me that I’m very sick.”
The Murphy family has been raising money to fund Dr. Tsang’s research. So far, they’ve raised $1.2-million and hope to hit the $2-million mark.
Mr. Murphy takes life one day at a time. But he and his wife believe that the donations and the information Dr. Tsang has gathered from treating him and others will make precision medicine more widely available. “There’s certainly been hope for me, but there’s hope for other people, too,” he said.