With heavy heart, I write this sad post to report my dear friend, Professor Bill Burhans, AnCan’s trusted Board and Advisory Board Member, and mentor and confidant to several readers, passed last Wednesday, Oct 9 after bravely managing his prostate cancer for six (6) years. He was 67 years old.
Bill was a remarkable man with a heart of gold who could not do enough to help others. Much of his life philosophy was developed through the loss of his mother to cancer in Bill’s teens, no doubt BRCA-induced; it left him and a younger sister raising the three youngest siblings. Bill’s caregiving for his mother significantly influenced how he responded to his own disease where it was of utmost importance to him that he did not create a burden for his immediate family.
Bill had a significant amount of cancer in his own family; that may have influenced his decision to become a cancer researcher although he once told me that was not his first choice of career; I seem to recall that may have had more to do with his love of nature and the outdoors. While he lived in Buffalo, teaching and researching at Roswell Park Cancer Institute since 1992, Bill’s heart lay in Vermont where he was raised and studied at the University of Vermont, both as an undergraduate and for his Ph.D. In later years, his favorite location for hiking, back-packing, X-country skiing, snow shoeing and stacking wood was in the Northeast Kingdom at his brother, Buzz’s house on The Hill although his siblings lived in the southern part of the state.
It was there that I first hung out with Professor Bill on a trip filled with synchronicity. One of my own rowing coaches, with the same nickname as Bill’s lifelong best buddy and brother, Buzz, was to be found teaching on a lake no more than 5 minutes from The Hill. Then it turned out that the future in-laws of another close friend and metastatic prostate cancer veteran from Marin, Ca. were also good friends of Buzz and his wife, Chris, and ran a maple syrup farm close by.
Bill and I first met through the UsTOO Prostate Cancer Forum on Inspire where Bill’s inimitable handle was @buffalowill ! His initial radiation treatment left Bill with significant damage to his urinary tract for the balance of his life, plaguing him with frequent serious UTI’s that often led to hospitalization. Bill hypothesized that his BRCA2 mutated genes made him way more susceptible to radiation damage than the normal patient; for his last 3 years or more, Bill had an intrathecal pain pump installed. Soon after diagnosis, Bill opted to germline test for inherited mutations based on his family history and was found positive for BRCA2 that tragically he has passed on. For several years Bill had been collaborating on the development of PARP-Inhibitors with other renown medical researchers like Dr. Johan de Bono at the Royal Marsden in the UK. Knowing the effectiveness of this drug category for BRCA driven disease, Bill argued to his own Roswell Park tumor board that they should prescribe olaparib off-label which they did. Bill got 2-3 years from suggesting this strategy.
Later on, when Bill switched his quarterback to Dr. Atish Choudhury at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, he participated in a clinical trial for an ATM inhibitor with a Parp-I (olaparib again). This time it was Dr. B’s own lab at Roswell Park that had discovered the key pathway through which the ATM inhibitor operated. Bill rapidly became a major celebrity on his visits to Dana-Farber.
Amongst Professor Bill’s other principle research interests were yeasts – in fact Bill characterized himself as a yeast geneticist. In this area,Bill spent a lot of time experimenting with sugar/glucose and its impact on cancer. He was one of the first scientists along with Valter Lungo to postulate the importance of fasting and the keto diet for cancer management. Unlike Lungo, Bill was not a self-promoter .. and for that we loved him.
It saddens us greatly that the published obituary fails to mention one word about prostate cancer. Awareness and teaching were amongst Bill’s highest priorities; in fact Bill delighted in telling his AnCan Advanced PCa Virtual Group about his hospice experience this past August and planned to repeat the presentation to a live audience at Roswell Park before becoming too sick.
Should you wish to make a donation in Professor Bill Burhan’s memory, you can do so here. A memorial service and mass will be held in Buffalo on Nov 16, 2019 – for further information, please e-mail me at info@ancan.org.