Now and then one comes across a story that really touches the heart of what it means to be human, and to live - and sometimes die - as positively as possible. Dr. Richard Scolyer appears to have been such a man.
Richard Scolyer, who has died aged 59, was a surgical pathologist who, with his colleague Georgina Long, revolutionised the treatment of advanced melanoma (skin cancer); in 2023 he became his own "guinea pig" after developing glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive brain cancers.
As co-directors of the Melanoma Institute Australia, dedicated to researching the lethal skin cancer that afflicts Australia more than any other nation, the two scientists pioneered a treatment which involves administering immunotherapy drugs before surgery so that the immune system is triggered by the whole cancer rather than the few remaining cells after tumour removal. Their work lifted the survival rate for advanced melanoma from less than 5 per cent in 2010 to more than 50 per cent today, saving thousands of lives.
But by 2024, when the pair were named joint Australian of the Year, Scolyer was facing his own cancer battle. It began during a visit to Poland in May 2023 when he found himself convulsing on the floor of his hotel room. An MRI scan carried out in Kraków showed a mass in his temporal lobe, and he knew immediately that it was bad news. A subsequent biopsy performed in Sydney diagnosed an aggressive grade 4 IDH-wildtype glioblastoma and Scolyer was given six to eight months to live.
"I didn't want to die. I loved my life," he wrote in a memoir, Brainstorm. Only three weeks earlier Scolyer, a keen sportsman, had represented Australia at the World Triathlon Multisport Championships. Now he had been given a death sentence: "It didn't sit right with me… to just accept certain death without trying something. It's an incurable cancer. Well bugger that!"
Under a team led by Georgina Long, Scolyer became "Patient Zero" for a radical form of treatment based on the approach developed for melanoma, which involved delaying surgery for two weeks while immunotherapy drugs were administered, allowing the immune system to train on millions of cancer cells. Scolyer decided to go public with his treatment, gaining thousands of followers on social media.
The regimen carried many dangers. Even a short delay in surgery could allow the tumour to grow, and there was a high chance the drugs' side-effects could kill him. "There was understandable resistance from some in the medical community," he recalled.
But early results were promising. When the tumour that had been removed was analysed, Long's team found that there had been an explosion of cancer-fighting immune cells. Then in May 2024, an MRI scan revealed that the tumour had not returned, though it did not mean the cancer was cured: "It's just nice to know that it hasn't come back yet, so I've still got some more time to enjoy my life," Scolyer said.
But in March this year, days before Scolyer was due to part in a charity cycling event in Tasmania, a brain scan showed that the cancer had progressed. "Not the best day ever," he told his followers on Facebook.
His death, three years after diagnosis, far exceeded the life expectancy for his tumour, and a clinical trial based on his treatment is now underway at Duke University in the US.
There's more at the link.
Effectively, Dr. Scolyear allowed his own body, and the process of his own dying and death, to be used for treatment and further research. As if to acknowledge his self-sacrifice, he survived his cancer for far longer than the norm for gioblastoma sufferers, thereby allowing a great deal of research to be conducted that will benefit others in future. Sadly, it couldn't benefit him, apart from giving him longer to set an example to the rest of us.
A tribute to him has been posted on the home page of Melanoma Institute Australia. There are many replies to it from those who remember him with love and kindness. I'll let this one speak for all of them.
If it were not for his brilliant work, I too would not be here today, having had lifesaving Immunotherapy for my late stage Melanoma diagnosis.
Words alone cannot express my gratitude and thanks, together with the sadness that you too were not able to have been afforded the opportunity of a second chance of life.
May you rest in peace Professor.
Indeed. May choirs of angels sing him to his rest.
Peter
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