AURORA | The long distance between his native England and his new home at the University of Colorado School of Medicine pales in comparison to the long strides he’s made in lung cancer research.
Ross Camidge, the director of the Thoracic Oncology Clinical Program in the Division of Medical Oncology and an associate professor of oncology, landed the job in October 2005 and hasn’t looked back since.
“One of the really nice things about working in America, and I think specifically in Colorado, is that if you come up with a good idea, people will run with it,” said Camidge, 45. “The first words out of their mouth aren’t, ‘No, we can’t do that.’”
His peers have recognized his efforts as well. The California-based Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation will honor Camidge with the 2012 Addario Lectureship Award, which recognizes researchers who make discoveries in lung cancer-related fields. Camidge, who received medical training at the University of Oxford and earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Cambridge, became interested in lung cancer because of its distressing fatality rate.
Lung cancer is a potentially fatal disease that accounts for the most cancer deaths in the United States. About 66 percent of the 200,000 people diagnosed with lung cancer in the United States will have an advanced stage of the disease, and about three-quarters of those patients will die within a year of diagnosis.
“It’s a huge problem, and it was crying out for breakthroughs,” Camidge said. “The survival rates are still appalling, and nobody is pretending we can go home and say we’ve done it all, but at least we’re starting to make progress.”
The medical oncology field intrigued him because of the intimate relationship that doctors and researchers can build with cancer patients.
“A diagnosis of cancer strips away a lot of the nonsense that is associated with most of our lives and focuses people on what’s important,” he said.
What’s important to him is coming up with ways to help the 2,500 people who are diagnosed with lung cancer in Colorado each year. One of Camidge’s influential discoveries started in 2006, when he began working on a clinical study of a drug called Crizotinib, that would later be shown to target a specific mutation in lung cancer occurring in a molecule called ALK, or anaplastic lymphoma kinase. This subtype of lung cancer is thought to be in about 20,000 patients across the United States.
Camidge is proud that the University of Colorado Hospital now boasts five oncologists who specialize in only lung cancer. The same can’t be said for any other hospital or oncology practice in the state, he said. Most oncology doctors have to be generalists, treating all of the many different types of cancers. But one of the main challenges he sees on a daily basis is that not enough lung cancer patients in the state are taking advantage of the expert knowledge that those five oncologists can deliver.
The hospital sees only a small amount — about 20 percent — of the 2,500 patients diagnosed with the cancer in Colorado.
“I would at least want the program here to be giving second opinions on a significantly higher proportion (of lung cancer patients) because that’s how we can change the state’s survival rate,” he said.
That, combined with how hard it is to land funding for lung cancer research are the toughest parts of Camidge’s job, he said. The funding problem is largely because the leading cause of lung cancer is also easily preventable: cigarette smoking.
“(That) has actually hampered development and research because it means people have lowered their sympathy for lung cancer patients, and I think it has reduced the number of research dollars that have become available,” he said.
That’s unfair, he says, because a person can increase their chances of getting lung cancer by smoking only 100 cigarettes, or five packs, in their lifetime; and not all people with lung cancer are smokers.
With Camidge’s help, the University of Colorado Hospital has made a name for itself as a leading institution in lung cancer research.
In any given year, about 30 percent of the University of Colorado’s lung cancer patients are involved in between 20 and 30 clinical trials at the hospital. Nationally, only about 3 percent of lung cancer patients will go on clinical trials. The oncologists at the hospital also recognize that not everybody’s lung cancer is the same. Every Monday, they discuss new and old cases to understand what treatment is appropriate for each patient.
Camidge says there are promising developments in lung cancer research that will hopefully occur in next decade or two.
First and foremost, he expects there to be a refined early detection process for the cancer, like mammograms for breast cancer and colonoscopies for colon cancer. Currently, low-dose CT scans are being considered for heavy smokers who are considered at high risk for lung cancer, but that doesn’t help the 15 percent of lung cancer patients who have no smoking history at all.
Camidge hopes that in his lifetime, ultimately lung cancer will become a chronic disease instead of a terminal one.
“Maybe I won’t cure everybody with advanced cancer, but if we can make it something you can live with like diabetes or asthma, that would be a fantastic step forward,” Camidge said.
Reach reporter Sara Castellanos at 720-449-9036 or sara@aurorasentinel.com.