Daniel Dyer sounded like he was standing up to the neighborhood bully.

"Cancer picked the wrong guy to mess with this time," he said.

Last summer, Dyer, a professor of organic chemistry and a researcher at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, was diagnosed with brain cancer.

He says he'll now concentrate his research on what makes cells mutate into cancer. And with years of detective work under his belt, he believes the answer is close.

This year, his speech, spelling and reading abilities faltered.

He attributed problems to Daddy-fatigue. He and his wife of 12 years, Denise, had just had their first child.

In June, he suffered a seizure. His doctor found a large tumor affecting the part of his brain responsible for speech and motor skills.

The survival rate for brain cancer is 25 percent at two years and 10 percent at five years.

"Longer than 10 years is almost anecdotal," said Dr. Joseph Simpson, radiation oncologist with the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and one of Dyer's physicians.

Simpson said brain cancer is so deadly because it permeates the brain with microscopic tentacles that remain after the tumor is removed.

It's a stubborn cancer, he said. "No matter how much surgery, it will show up again and (safe) dosages of radiation don't prevent it from returning,"

Dyer told the physicians at Siteman Cancer Center to give him maximum doses of everything. "I prefer they be aggressive," Dyer said. "I'm young enough and strong enough."

He visits St. Louis weekly for treatments.

"I decided to go back to my colleagues and said I want to work on this problem that's killing me," he said.

The unofficial name of the project is the Southern Illinois Institute for Brain Chemistry.

He says that cells have thousands of varieties of proteins that do as many jobs. A tiny number go bad and kill the cell or mutate it. But the thick cell stew prevents precise examination of individual bad proteins.

"The challenge is how to separate (the bad ones) from the others so we can ... compare them to healthy proteins," he said. The findings could show how to detect or even prevent bad proteins.

"We'll be looking for donations and writing a lot of grants," he said.

The attraction will be that he and his colleagues were close to a solution this year.

They have invented devices that separate families of proteins — in a matter of seconds. The next step is to separate specific proteins.

"We know they're there," he said. "We just have to find a way to isolate them."

Meanwhile, Dyer has joined a clinical trial testing a brain cancer drug. "If the tumor comes back, we know it didn't work."

Also, sometimes his challenge is troubling.

"That's the hardest part," he said, "thinking, maybe I won't be able to see my daughter grow up."


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Jackie Hutcherson

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