Duke University Student Searching for Cure for Chordoma

A Duke University student is searching for a cure to chordoma, a one-in-a-million form of cancer that he has been diagnosed with.

Josh Sommer, a junior environmental engineering major at Duke, has been spending hours on searching for the cure to this disease, which only 300 people are diagnosed with per year.

Chordoma strikes all ages, at different spots along the spinal column. The tumors can be removed, but the cancer is aggressive. Chemotherapy doesn't work against it and life expectancy is around seven years.

The MRI showed that Josh's tumor was in a tough spot, in a bone inside his skull. The tumor extended onto his brain stem and wrapped around several arteries. Sommer went through two surgeries, then weeks of recovery in the hospital.

While very little is known about chordoma, the only researcher in the country with a grant to study chordoma happened to be at Duke.

Throughout his pursuit for finding the cure for chordoma, Sommer became friends with Andy Martin, a Tulane medical student who both studied and suffered from a cancer called sinonasal undifferentiated carcinoma, which is even rarer than chordoma. Unfortunately, in 2004, Martin passed away due to the disease.

Sommer now works in Michael Kelley's lab, but is focused on the Chordoma Foundation, which he and his mother founded to push every aspect of chordoma research.

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