My mom was a cancer survivor. In 1998, she was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer. After surgery to remove the tumor, she received 5-FU as adjuvant chemotherapy. Every time she left home for outpatient chemo treatment in the cancer center, she was so scared to tremble. She almost gave up because of the side effect. However, 5-FU was the only drug that oncologists can give to the colon cancer patients at that time. My mom persisted with great pain to finish the treatment course.

Two years later, a metastatic lesion was found in her liver. She almost collapsed. The surgeon in Taiwan had done a very skillful, clean job to remove the tumor, but my mom was still treated with 5-FU after the surgery. After another full year with pain and fear, she survived and remained cancer free to these days.

In the beginning of 21st century, I went to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas for Ph.D. study. I learned that Dr. John Mendelsohn developed anti-EGFR (Cetuximab) for treatment of multiple cancer types, including colon cancer. The first decade of this century is the time of target therapy booming. In the second decade, immune checkpoint inhibitors emerged and became prosperous. In the field of radiotherapy, heavy particle (e.g. proton) therapy in combination with computerized localization greatly improved the precision and efficacy. The days which a few chemo drugs were the only choices for cancer patients have been gone. The oncologists have more powerful "ammo" to fight cancer, not to mention all the exciting new developments such as cell therapies and more targeted and immuno-therapies. The cancer patients do not have to go through what my mom experienced in the last century. We have to understand,  almost all these new, effective therapies have the roots in academic research, especially those supported by governments

Nevertheless, a mystic observation of her situation at that time still remained in my mind.

Before her diagnosis of cancer, she had endured on-and-off, minor abdomen pain for two years. It was accompanied with persistent itching rash on her thigh. She visited dermatologists time by time, but all the anti-inflammatory pills and even steroid ointment did not help at all. That condition bothered her relentlessly.

However, right after the surgical removal of the tumor in colon, the rash disappeared completely. In fact, it never came back, not even after the last dose of 5-FU, which can affect immune response. I was glad for her but could not understand.

Fast forwarding to 2020, when we all worked from home, my friend Julio Valencia had a virtual meeting with me. He had an interesting finding: tumor implanted into a lupus mouse model caused inflammation in multiple organs; however, tumor recruited immunosuppressive myeloid cells to protect itself from immune response. He wanted me to help to validate the results on human patient data.

I almost jumped out before he finished his sentence. After these many years, now I understood what caused the rash in my mom's case and why it went away right after the surgery. This probably would happen in patients with inherited allergic condition, like my mom. I told Julio that I will do my best to finish the analysis as soon, and he kindly included me in the authorship.

Eventually, the paper was published in Cancer Research (https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article-abstract/81/23/5977/674859/Myeloid-Derived-Suppressive-Cell-Expansion). It did not receive much attention or many citations. However, in my mind, it is much more important than those "high-impact" papers that I published. If the connection between cancer and allergic condition were known 30 years ago, maybe my mom's colon cancer could be diagnosed at early stage, and a colonoscopic surgery could take care of it in a single day. However, after the publication of this paper, for our career path change, both Julio and I did not do a follow-up research. I hope someone can pick it up: could the allergic response be a diagnostic marker? Would it predict response to ICB therapies? More importantly, as cancer researchers, we should listen to patients all the time. They will teach us to understand and overcome this disease.