Cancer Today - Winter 2018/2019

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Your Tumor, a program of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN). For patients participating in the program, PanCAN pays for a third-party company to coordinate testing. Billing for the tests themselves is handled through patients’ health insurance.

away. She even got a new dog, Lucy, an emotional support animal, and she is arranging to volunteer with her as a therapy dog at cancer centers.

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Kiernan says that without her sister’s prodding, she would never have been able to benefit from

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Kiernan, a retired high school nurse, was diagnosed months before the approval of Keytruda for MSI-H solid tumors. She learned in February 2018 that she was among less than 2 percent of pancreatic cancer patients who have tumors that are MSI-H, and she started on Keytruda in April 2018.

Keytruda. She even remembers bringing her original oncologist a newspaper article on immunotherapy and being told that it wouldn’t work for her because she had pancreatic cancer.

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“My sister is a reader. She just surfs the whole internet,” Kiernan says of her path to tumor testing.

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“I’m a different person,” Kiernan says of her
life now. Her tumors have gotten smaller. She
had been suffering from severe back pain, but a
week after she started the drug, the pain went
“She’s older. She’s retired, has the time and loves me
very much. She did homework and found out.”

180425_Cancer_Today_AD.pdf 1 4/25/18 4:30 PM

KATE YANDELL is the digital editor of Cancer Today.

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