“We really have two lines of therapy, and then that's it. We don't have anything more for those patients."
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — “We're together 24-seven,” Terri Snodgrass said. “We get a little nit-picky sometimes, but we never fuss or fight."
Terri and her husband, Wayne, are inseparable.
“She's a humdinger,” Wayne said.
Though the two rarely disagree, the couple never fathomed they would be confronted with the biggest battle of their lives - one they would face together.
"I felt tired all the time, Terri said.
In December 2020, Terri was diagnosed with stage four metastatic pancreatic cancer that had spread throughout her body.
“Devastation. I think it affected him more than it did me,” Terri said.
"When we got married, she said it's forever, and the preacher man who married us said, 'I'm tying that knot real good,”” Wayne said.
Pancreatic cancer has the lowest survival rate of all cancers, and most stage four patients do not survive passed a year.
"There are tumors that we don't have a lot of treatments for, pancreas cancer for example,” Dr. Susanna Ulahannan, an oncologist at Stephenson Cancer Center, said. “We really have two lines of therapy, and then that's it. We don't have anything more for those patients."
It simply does not exist yet, but Terri’s team of doctors believes they are in to something. That something is called molecular sequencing, and the results were astonishing.
"What we do is sequence the tumor for hundreds of genes, and then if there are certain mutations in that gene that we can target, we can do more of a personalized medicine,” Ulahannan said. "It showed to my surprise, usually in metastatic pancreas cancer, they don't have a lot of mutations that we can target. Terri was different."
Terri had hundreds of mutations, and an ongoing clinical trial targeted many of the very mutations Terri had. She stayed on the trial for a year without much luck. Terri began a second trial and then a third that also targeted mutations. Terri’s cancer shrank to just two spots.
"I was like , Can we think outside the box? She's not a normal patient. She was diagnosed in December of 2020. We are now in 2023, and this is all the disease she has. These two spots that we can see,’” Ulahannan said.
Dr. Laura Fischer then surgically removed the tumors.
“It was quite a challenging procedure, but we were able to get them out,” Fischer said.
"She said, ‘When I went in there, I couldn't believe it. It looked like all dead tumor.’ And so she took everything out, and we look at it under the microscope. It's all dead. No viable tissue at all. So we do a PET scan, and the PER scan is negative. We can't see any cancer on the pet scan,” Ulahannan said.
Doctors stopped all of Terri’s cancer treatment in August of 2023 and to this day can find no cancer.
“This is a new drug that is not on the market. It's a brand new drug, and she had this type of response where we can't see anymore cancer,” Ulahannan said.The drug is so new that it does not have a name and is not on the market. It is a phase one trial in a pill form that targets mutations. There are three phases of trial treatments. Phase one determines if a drug is safe to use.
"It works really well in mice, but we don't know if it’s going to work in people, and we don't know if it’s going to be safe in people,” Ulahannan said.
In phase two, doctors focus on specific tumor types, and in stage three the new drug is given to patients instead of the normal standard of care.
“What did I have to lose?" Terri said. “I wanted to live."
"It is a miracle, and that's the thing when we do clinical trials we don't always know what to expect,” Ulahannan said.From start to finish it is about a 10 year process for drugs to hit the market. Still in clinical development, this unnamed drug will most likely get FDA accelerated approval thanks in part to Terri’s outcome.
"Is this case going to help that?""Yes. For sure. It's very unique,” Ulahannan said. “She is very, very unique."
After multiple experiences and hundreds of doctors’ appointments, Terri is cancer-free. Her husband never missed any of those appointments and never left her side.
“Two peas in a pod,” he said. “That's what we call each other."
“In order to fight, you've got to have determination, and I have a lot of it,” Terri said.
