Stanford professor turned Stage IV lung cancer patient navigates rapidly evolving treatments and coverage barriers
Bryant Lin, a Stanford medical professor who founded the university's Center for Asian Health Research and Education, was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in May 2024 — the same disease he had spent years advocating against. Lin, a non-smoker, has since undergone multiple targeted therapies as new treatments received FDA approval during his course of care. The five-year survival rate across all stages of lung cancer has doubled over three decades but remains at roughly 30%.
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Bryant Lin was teaching a lung cancer class at Stanford and leading a research center focused on the disease when, in May 2024, he learned he had Stage IV lung cancer himself. "Super ironic that I would be co-leading the center that supports research and education in this disease, and I get diagnosed myself," Lin said. He describes himself, as a non-smoker, as both lucky and hopeful about what he calls a rapidly changing treatment landscape.
The central development enabling many recent advances is comprehensive genomic testing, which identifies the specific genetic mutation driving a patient's cancer. UCLA oncologist Jonathan Goldman, who served as principal investigator on a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, said targeted drugs developed for specific cancer subtypes have shown dramatic reductions in recurrence. "Survival used to be under a year, and now it's often several years and sometimes many years," Goldman said. Lin initially began taking Tagrisso (osimertinib), a daily pill the FDA had approved just three months before his diagnosis in combination with chemotherapy.
Access to genomic testing, however, is uneven. Goldman said fewer than half of lung cancer patients in the United States receive genetic testing before treatment begins, partly because the evaluation is not yet considered standard of care, and partly because general oncologists may not be current on rapidly evolving lung-cancer-specific developments. "The next step is not just these scientific discoveries, but learning how to implement these findings," Goldman said.