126 8 APRIL 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6589 science.org SCIENCE

PHOTO: KRISTON JAE BETHEL

Preventive vaccines that wipe out nascent tumors

are now being tested in healthy people

TAKING A SHOT AT CANCER

FEATURES

W

hen Dave Dubin learned at

age 29 that he had colon

cancer, it wasn’t a big sur-

prise. His grandfather and

father had both survived the

disease. “It was almost the

Dubin way, and we just went

on,” Dubin says. He had sur-

gery and chemotherapy, but

his cancer came back 10 years later. Ge-

netic testing finally found an explanation

for his family’s trials: a mutation in a DNA

repair gene that lets genetic errors pile up

in dividing cells. The disease, Lynch syn-

drome, comes with up to a 70% lifetime

risk of cancer.

Dubin, 55, gets annual colonoscopies,

endoscopies, and imaging scans, which

caught a third cancer, in his kidney. His

eldest son, Zach Dubin, 26, inherited the

DNA repair mutation and also regularly

gets checked for cancer. “It’s no fun. No-

body enjoys it,” Dave Dubin says—not the

2-day colonoscopy prep and procedure, nor

the worrying about possible tumors. The

disease also turned him into an activist.

He and his family in Haworth, New Jersey,

By Jocelyn Kaiser