Deanna Lee was absentmindedly massaging her neck while breastfeeding her fourth child, a four-month-old baby girl, when she felt a lump on her collarbone. She had been feeling fatigue but otherwise perfectly healthy — and any mother of three boys and a baby would feel exhausted, she reasoned. Still, she visited a doctor and got a biopsy of the area.

Deanna was shocked when she got the results.

At 43, she was diagnosed with stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer. Not only was she asymptomatic aside from the fatigue, she had no family history of cancer, had never smoked, and was an active person, regularly going on hiking and ski trips with her family. 

When she met with an oncologist for the first time, she asked how she should be thinking about her cancer treatment and prognosis. Should she be thinking about endings, preparing her children to say goodbye to their mother? 

“He’s like, ‘No, no, no,’” she remembers. “He said, ‘You should think about living. You need to live for your four kids.’”

Science bringing hope to patients

When Deanna’s targeted treatment didn’t work, the cancer spread to her left lung and small spots on her brain. But still, she didn’t panic. From the beginning, she and her doctor discussed the range of treatments available and that if one didn’t work, they would try another.

Next, she started immunotherapy in combination with a clinical trial drug. And this time, the treatment began working quickly. The cancer in her left lung and brain receded. She began to feel stronger. In fact, between infusion appointments in the summer of 2024, Deanna felt well enough to travel to Japan and Korea with her family to celebrate her mom’s 70th birthday. 

“I was able to keep up with the crowd,” she says. “There were hard days, but it was amazing.”

Deanna is grateful to be a part of the clinical trial and that there is such a variety of treatment options available today for cancer patients — and that those options continue to expand.

“[Treatments are] always evolving and that’s why I think I’m hopeful for tomorrow,” she says. “Stage 4 lung cancer looks a lot different today than what it used to. …There are people that are studying and doing the research to find the solutions for cancer patients.”

Refining transformative treatments

One of those people is Scott Peterson, head of ADC discovery and cancer immunology at Pfizer. Scott has been working in cancer drug discovery for about 25 years and, most recently, has been leading research on a class of medicines called antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). 

ADCs are targeted cancer therapies made up of three main components. First, a cancer-killing drug, or payload, is designed to destroy tumor cells. This payload is attached to monoclonal antibodies — engineered proteins that specifically seek out and bind to cancer cells. Finally, a linker connects the payload to the antibody, keeping it stable as it travels through the body until it releases the drug inside the tumor cell. By precisely targeting cancer cells, ADCs aim to deliver the treatment more effectively while limiting damage to healthy cells, reducing potential side effects.

“It’s very much like a cancer chemotherapy, but instead of having it just indiscriminately float around the body, hoping that it gets to the tumor cell and kills it, we can direct it more and increase the exposure to the tumor,” Scott explains. “It’s really an elegant use of what nature provided to us as part of our immune system by engineering antibodies to deliver these cancer drugs.”

Over the past decade, ADCs have transformed treatment for many patients with certain cancers, including lymphoma, breast cancer, and bladder cancer. However there is still work to do, Scott says. 

“Each cancer is as individual as the person, and what that means is that we need therapies that can address the uniqueness of the tumor,” Scott says. “I am confident that we’re going to learn more. We’re working to get more therapies that are more individualized and that address specific cancers and hopefully improve the response rates for patients, improve their survival time, and also improve the safety so the side effects are lessened.”

“Each cancer is as individual as the person, and what that means is that we need therapies that can address the uniqueness of the tumor.”

— Scott Peterson, head of ADC discovery and cancer immunology at Pfizer

Sharing hope and motivation 

Deanna and Scott met at Pfizer’s Bothell, Wash., office, where Deanna read a letter she’d written, sharing the story of how her surprising diagnosis upended her life. 

At the end of the letter, she asks Scott how he sees cancer treatments evolving in the future. 

Scott explains the promise of ADCs, saying, “Antibody-drug conjugates are a way to make cancer chemotherapy more targeted. It basically is the delivery vehicles that rely on the specificity of antibodies to direct the chemotherapy to the tumor, to increase how much of that chemotherapy can get to the tumor compared to the rest of the body, and that enables ADCs to do better for patients compared to traditional chemotherapy.”

“As I hear about the research that you’re doing — even though, as a patient, I’m fighting the disease by myself — I don’t feel so alone,” Deanna says. “I feel I have a whole team, like my army behind my back, doing all this research.”

Scott and Deanna laugh, but he confirms this by sharing more about his team and the mission and motivation behind their work, a motivation that now includes Deanna. 

“It’s all about bringing the next medicines to help heal people,” he says. “It is a mission that not just the scientists but everybody who works at Pfizer feels. It is what drives us. I can’t wait to tell my colleagues about this experience because I know it’s going to motivate them.”

Deanna says she also can’t wait to go home and share the experience with her own team — her husband and children. The two end the conversation with a hug and a new sense of camaraderie, determination, and hope for new research and future treatment options.