Exclusive | I was diagnosed with Stage 3 rectal cancer at 26 a new therapy wiped it out in 4 months

After getting engaged, the only words journalist Mrinali Dhembla expected to hear were “I do.”Instead, she was told, “You have cancer.”“When I first heard the words, ‘You have cancer,’ I was obviously very shaken because when you’re in your 20s, you just think that a little disturbance in your bowels isn’t a big thing.You can just live through it,” said Dhembla, 27.Dhembla was diagnosed early last year with an aggressive Stage 3 rectal cancer that had already spread to her spine, part of a troubling rise in colorectal cancer among adults under 50.Treatment would typically involve surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

But Dhembla got a very special invitation — she became one of the first patients to receive the one-two punch of nivolumab and ipilimumab.The Food and Drug Administration approved the dual-immunotherapy drug regimen last year for advanced cancers such as melanoma, mesothelioma and colorectal cancer.“We started this immunotherapy, and she’s had a pretty remarkable response,” Dr.Nicholas Hornstein, an assistant professor of medical oncology at the Northwell Health Cancer Institute, said of Dhembla.“I am optimistic that, with the right patients, these new treatments can provide enormous benefits in a relatively short amount of time, something that would have been unlikely five years ago.”  Genetic testing revealed that Dhembla has Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition caused by mutations in genes that repair DNA replication errors.“Think of these genes like a spellcheck system for your DNA,” Hornstein told The Post.“When cells divide, small errors naturally occur, and these mismatch repair proteins are supposed to find and fix those errors,” he added.

“In people with Lynch syndrome, that spellcheck system is broken, so DNA errors pile up over time, and that can lead to cancer.”People who know that they have Lynch syndrome should begin colonoscopy screening between the ages of 20 and 25, or two to five years b...