World lung cancer expert diagnosed with advanced lung cancer

By Jessica Cordova

In his 20-year research career in Colorado, University of Colorado Cancer Center member D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, has published nearly 400 academic papers. But perhaps none have been so personal to him as a May 2025 analysis, published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, on how clinical researchers describe the side effects caused by new anti-cancer treatments.

“If a treatment is so horrible that a patient can’t handle it, then it is not an advancement in care,” Camidge says. “We don’t treat laboratory models or even patients. We treat people with lives that the cancer is in the way of.”

→ When ‘Acceptable’ is Unacceptable: A Call for Objectivity in Cancer Trial Results.

In the article, Camidge notes that “using terms such as ‘tolerable’ or ‘acceptable’ places the investigators running clinical trials in the untenable position of determining whether a patient’s experiences with toxicity are ‘tolerable’ or ‘acceptable’ to the patient. Similarly, words such as ‘encouraging’ or ‘favorable’ used in efficacy reporting may reflect the enthusiasm of the investigators to continue development of a treatment but may be interpreted very differently by the people considering receiving the treatment.”

It’s research he hopes will help other lung cancer doctors and all oncologists to better treat their patients, but it’s also research that reflects his own personal experience. 

What few of his colleagues knew at the time the paper was published was that Camidge — one of the world’s leading lung cancer researchers — had himself been diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer in 2022. Earlier this year, he had a progression that led to treatment that was harder the second time around.

“The chemotherapy was a little different this time around, and it was really tough on me,” he says. “It was the closest thing to being completely incapacitated I've ever been. Sometimes I was just lying there, and the only function of each day was for it to finish so that the next day I might feel a little bit better.”

For the past three years, Camidge has only revealed his diagnosis to a small group. But after the recent progression, he feels it is time to reveal that he is also a patient.

“I didn't want to end my life like that and have people say, ‘And oh, by the way, he had lung cancer.’ There's the potential for some good to come out of this dual role, expert and patient, and I thought this might be the time to share.”

Could it be?

It started with a wheeze and a little pain in his back, which Camidge originally thought could have been due to a pulled muscle. But after a few weeks, he decided it was time to see his doctor.

“As a good paranoid oncologist, I thought, ‘Let me just go to my primary care physician,’” says Camidge, the Joyce Zeff Chair in Lung Cancer Research in the CU School of Medicine. “During that appointment on June 10, 2022, I said to them, ‘Oh, by the way, I am a lung cancer oncologist, so could we get a chest x-ray?’ They rolled their eyes, but they ordered one.”

“I went and got the chest x-ray on the way back to my office. Then I pulled it up on my computer a short time later. As soon as I saw my chest x-ray, I knew. I’ve seen thousands of people with lung cancer, and you see the chest x-ray, and you go, ‘That's lung cancer.’”

His doctor then scheduled him for a CT scan the same day. His wife, Windy, and young daughters were boating up in the mountains at the time. “I told Windy what was going on and that I was worried but that they should finish their day on the lake.”

“Later the same day, I was looking at the CT scan myself, and I could see that there were deposits in both lungs, in bones, and it turns out they were in my brain as well. So, I knew on the same day I had gone in with just a wheeze and a pulled muscle that I had cancer and that it was advanced and incurable,” Camidge says. “I moved into professional mode.”

A bronchoscopy to get a biopsy from his lungs provided the last piece of the puzzle to confirm Camidge had advanced non-small cell lung cancer driven by a specific acquired genetic change in the tumor cells — one of the types of lung cancer he has spent his career researching and treating.

He went from visiting his primary care physician to receiving a full diagnosis, complete with body and brain scans, a biopsy, and molecular testing, and starting targeted therapy all within four days. The process normally takes about two weeks, Camidge explains, “I didn’t call in any favors. I think my colleagues just stepped up to the plate for one of their own. However, to me it also shows this timeline is possible, and we should try to do that for everyone.”

Once Camidge was through all of the necessary diagnostic procedures and the treatment had started, the professionalism faded, and the reality hit him.

“Two things would make me cry repeatedly for multiple days,” he says, “One was anyone being nice to me. The other was any thought about my children, in terms of what their future is and whether I’d have a role in that.”

Camidge has two daughters. At the time of his diagnosis, Sophie was 12 and Alex was 10. “They were still so vulnerable. I didn’t want to go away. I didn’t want to not be there to help them through all the challenges of life.”

Starting treatment

It was clear that the tumor was not something that could be cut out, so Camidge went to one of his former trainees and colleague, CU Cancer Center member Tejas Patil, MD, to ask if he would be his oncologist.

“One of the things that I thought about when I was taking care of Ross was that this is not going to be a traditional doctor-patient relationship,” Patil explains. “This is really going to be like a coach relationship. Thinking of the way former Swiss tennis player Roger Federer had a coach, I was always wondering what the coach could possibly teach Roger Federer, who's the best in the world at what he does. But I think coaches act as a mirror and can help point out things that sometimes get missed. I viewed my relationship with him like that.”

Camidge, who was 55 at the time of his diagnosis, was able to start treatment right away with a daily pill of targeted therapy directed towards the genetic change driving his cancer. Then he started chemotherapy for 12 weeks, followed by weeks of on and off radiation therapy to everything his colleagues could still see on the scans.

“It was the most aggressive thing we could have done,” says Patil, adding that three years later, this combination is now almost the standard of care, though it was not at the time.

After finishing his chemo and radiation around the holidays of 2022, Camidge entered a phase where he would continue his daily pill and get scans of his body and brain, as well as blood work, every 90 days.

“When you start with those scans, you enter this period of time for about a week before the scan where you go a little crazy, and you get very angry with people if they talk about anything in the future,” says Camidge. “You can’t even plan for next week.”

Every time his blood work and scans were completed, Camidge would head to his office and look at the reports and the images himself. His experience let him know the outcome of his treatment right away. The medication, the chemotherapy, and the radiation shrank everything down, and for years,  there was no further cancer growth.

“With each good scan, then this weight that has been building up just comes off your shoulders. And I know this sounds like ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ but the colors are a little brighter, and the birdsong is a little louder, and you just feel very happy.”

90-Day Challenge

“It became clear that I didn't want the time between scans to just be me waiting until the next bit of bad news,” Camidge says. “I wanted to be able to look back on each of those 90-day periods and say, ‘I did X.’ So, we created the idea of the 90-day challenge, which we spilled over into the patients, the staff, and everyone else.”

The goal was not to climb Mount Everest, he says, though it could be if you wanted. The idea behind the challenge was to do something you have been putting off or always wanted to do, to help the time between scans become more than just waiting.

“It initially started with me wanting to get my fitness back, so I was going to do a couch to 5K, which actually took me two sets of 90 days to get to the 5K."

“But then I would do other things,” he adds. “I went to yoga classes for the first time.” He also learned how to draw and do watercolor, went to a restaurant he always wanted to try, bought a twenty-year-old convertible, rejuvenated his garden, tried archery, and many other new things.

“It doesn't have to be monumental. Just have an answer when asked, ‘What did you do in those 90 days?’ It could be, ‘I went to see great Auntie Gertie,’ but you did something.”

Progression

In February 2025, nearly three years after his diagnosis, Camidge had his first progression. His quarterly CT scan showed that everything was fine, but his blood-based markers had gone up.

“Then we did a PET scan,” says Camidge. “And there was a little strip lighting up at the back of my right thorax, in what's called the pleura, the outer lining of the lung.”

Although some lung cancers are caused by smoking, Camidge was never a smoker, and this type of acquired mutation in his cancer is not caused by cigarettes.

“So somewhere along the 50-odd years of my life, I breathed something in, and it landed on one of my lung cells. That caused a change in the DNA and the genetic material in that cell, and it became a cancer,” he says.

The progression of his cancer this year meant that Camidge had to start chemotherapy and radiotherapy again, this time adding an additional antibody-based treatment to the chemo.

Coming out of this progression, Camidge’s appearance has changed. “I have more freckles on my face, and I have scabs on my head and have lost some hair too.”

Camidge is also in a different mental place going into his next set of scans coming up in a few weeks. He says he has less anxiety about what the scans will show.

“There's an element of the first progression event being something that you're most terrified of, that’s the worst pre-scan anxiety, because it's potentially the first bell ring of mortality,” he says. “You're not immortal, that scan could announce. You're not going to be the exception. You're not going to be the one who never progresses. That's what you're afraid of.”

He says he is going into the next set of scans after having heard that ring already, “not with as much fear, almost with an acceptance.”

Sharing the news

When a patient is diagnosed with lung cancer and comes to Camidge for care, he tells them it is important to “figure out who you're going to tell, what you're going to tell, get your finances in order, and figure out what's important to you in terms of, ‘If you only had a certain amount of time left and you had the flexibility to do it, what do you want to do with that time?’”

Camidge took his own advice. When he was first diagnosed, Camidge decided he was not going to go public with the diagnosis. For treatment, he went to a satellite clinic in Cherry Creek to avoid running into his own patients. He shared with his team but kept the diagnosis within a small group.

“One way to protect yourself was not telling people, then they don't have to be nice to you or treat you differently,” Camidge says. “They could just be as ornery and unpleasant as they normally are, and that's totally fine.”

He also did not want to take the focus away from his patients and wanted to continue to make progress in the thoracic oncology space. “I debated whether I should still see patients or take on new patients. I got my clinic team to promise to tell me if they thought I was acting differently, and so far, the years of professionalism are still winning through. Although I try and build the clinics of my colleagues with most of the new patients that enter the program, as I should, I have continued to see my patients, because I believe, I am still adding value.”

“We had just bought a new house, which we'd been doing up, and financially I didn't want to suddenly not be invited to this, that, and the other thing where I am paid for my expertise.”

Now, multiple necessities are set in place. His finances are stabilized, and there are new faculty members to take his patients if he gets to a place where he needs to stop practicing. He feels if, “other opportunities go away, or people don’t want to see me, simply because some people now know something they didn’t know for the last three years but I’m still performing at the same level, then so be it. If people embrace an expert with a lived-experience of what they are an expert in, maybe some good could come of that too.”

His daughters growing up over the past three years has also played a role in how much he has begun to feel comfortable about publicly sharing his condition.

“By the end of the year, our children will turn 16 and 14, they’re full-on teenagers, but when I was diagnosed, I felt they were just little girls,” says Camidge. “Over time, they can process things differently. Windy had looked up the best way to break this sort of news to children, and we told them about the diagnosis within about a week. Pretty much once I'd started on treatment. We didn't sugarcoat things. We didn't say this is curable or is going to go away. But we highlighted that I was on a treatment and also how well Daddy's patients usually do. Over the years, they’ve met some of my patients at various functions, and they often look pretty good.”

Becoming an expert

At age 19, long before he became an internationally recognized lung cancer researcher, Camidge, who was born in 1966, started his medical career as a student at the University of Oxford. Going into his third year of medical school, when you normally start clinical work, Camidge decided he was not done with his scientific training and so went to Cambridge to get his PhD in molecular biology.

He then returned to Oxford Medical School with a few more years of maturity under his belt and began his clinical training.  He ended up choosing to pursue oncology because it combined molecular biology and patient care.

During the time he was working at cancer centers in England and Scotland, Camidge elected to pursue a training attachment with AstraZeneca to learn about drug development directly as an industry physician. Following completion of his training in the UK, he then decided to follow his career in academic oncology to the United States.

“While I was at AstraZeneca, that was when the first targeted therapies were being developed, and some of the best responses were being seen in patients with lung cancer. I felt this was an area that was about to explode. I also really liked the patients with lung cancer that I had met. They were often a little beaten down and humble, and their lack of demands made me want to step toward them even more,” explained Camidge on why he decided to focus his career on lung cancer.

He went on to explain, “Lung cancer kills more men and women than breast cancer, bowel cancer, pancreas cancer, prostate cancer – combined. And yet people only think it affects heavy smokers, which is not the case.”

In October 2005, Camidge decided CU was the place for him after learning more about the growing amount of drug development taking place there. 

Eventually, he became director of CU’s Thoracic Oncology Program, helping to grow it into a nationally and internationally recognized center that accrues about 40% of lung cancer patients into clinical trials – more than double the rate of the next best academic lung cancer program in the country and more than 10 times the national average.

“The research I am most proud of is when we saw something first and reported it first, even though it was under everyone’s nose,” says Camidge.

When looking at his own diagnosis and treatment plan, he could see developments that he had helped put in place.

“There was an element of, ‘Oh, I'm benefiting from some of the research that I've done myself. That’s cool.’”

Fellow lung cancer oncologists have recognized Camidge’s work, which has led to multiple awards over his career. One of the honors Camidge received was the Bonnie Addario Lectureship Award from the Addario Lung Cancer Foundation in California.

“I was lucky enough to get the Addario award pretty early in my career. I had to set up a lot of things in Colorado without much senior input or feedback. So, when I looked at past winners of this big award, who were all very distinguished, I felt that maybe I wasn’t terrible at my job and that keeps you going,” Camidge says. “It included having your photo up in Times Square for a microsecond — long enough to get a photograph of it, which I still have.”

But his favorite award he received was in 2014, from Claremont University, for being “an exemplary mentor in the positive development of junior colleagues in the profession.”

Training the Next Generation

Even after diagnosis, Camidge continues to prioritize being a mentor.

“You get to a point in your career where another presentation, publication, or award doesn’t have the tingle it used to. But seeing people you have helped find their version of success still does that for me,” says Camidge.

One of the trainees who has worked closely with Camidge for the past two years is thoracic oncology fellow Alec Watson, MD. Camidge told him about his diagnosis within a few days of his arrival. If anything, it has deepened Watson’s experience learning about treating patients and research techniques from one of the world's experts in thoracic oncology.

“Ross has an ability to turn a problem around and to ask questions that haven't occurred to other people, or if they occur, we don't think that's something feasible to answer,” Watson says. “But he has such a curious mind and is able to parse a problem and look at it from a different angle that leads to these very insightful questions that are important for practice.”

Watson says that in the clinic, Camidge also has much to share.

“The way that he approaches and builds relationships with his patients is something I plan to emulate as best I can and incorporate into my practice,” Watson says. “He has an ability to connect and to care for his patients that goes beyond the medical side. I think that is what a lot of people are looking for in their physicians, especially caring for something as impactful as a cancer diagnosis.”

After his diagnosis, Camidge started a podcast with OncLive, How This is Building Me, interviewing many different people around the world who have experience of, or who work with, cancer across the full spectrum of life experiences. Again, he did not tell the organizers of the podcast, or any of his guests about his diagnosis.

“I remember one episode where I interviewed a hospice chaplain,” Camidge says. “Some of the questions I am asking are clearly coming from a different place of knowledge than the audience really appreciates.”

It’s all part of Camidge’s new reality — the irony of being the lung cancer expert who is now facing a terminal diagnosis of his own. The patient he wrote about in his article about unendurable side effects is no longer hypothetical.

“Early on, when I told a close friend of mine that I had lung cancer, I said, ‘Maybe the cancer gods are just sick and tired of me making progress, and they're getting their own back,’” he says. “And she replied, ‘No, you were diagnosed now because it was the right time to be diagnosed. And the cancer gods were saying, look, you've made this progress, now you are ready to take on this burden.’”