After completing his undergrad year of college, Daniel Kingsley found himself shadowing his former physician, Dr. Agne Petrosuite, at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital when he came across a family receiving a childhood cancer diagnosis and knew he had to say something. 

“I just wanted to say that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

For Dan, who had been diagnosed with cancer as a teenager, it was a full-circle moment. 

Three years after he shared his story, he saw the fruits of that connection. While accumulating hours at the same hospital to reapply for medical school, he saw that same family, celebrating their child’s last day in treatment.

“I remember the mom was just like, ‘I don't know if you knew this back then, but your words really gave us the push to keep going, because everything felt helpless at that time."

For nearly 15 years Dan has been cancer-free, but he remembers experiencing that same sense of hopelessness all too well as a kid.

When he was 12 years old, Dan started to grow fatigued doing all his regular activities like riding bikes, camping and playing baseball. The fatigue became so severe that he could no longer last a single inning as catcher and found himself turning back in the middle of a hike. Dan’s mom knew something was off. 

After several doctors’ visits and tests, a bone marrow biopsy uncovered the cause of the extreme fatigue: high-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Within the first month of treatment, Dan was getting better, but his battle was not over. Years of harsh treatments kept him at home for days on end with a tutor to help him through school until the next weekly dose. And worse, he developed steroid-induced diabetes and avascular necrosis in his right leg. Thankfully, he recovered once taken off the steroid, and even better, by the age of 16 Dan was cancer-free!

Dan’s journey stuck with him. He remembers receiving a blood transfusion at 14 years old beside another child in treatment who was only 4. “You would never have known what he was going through and that he was getting treatment,” he said. He went on to explain, “They’re normal kids and they're happy, and in the end it's just not fair to them. And so that was really what pushed me into ‘this is what I want to do’.”

From there, Dan decided to dedicate his career to creating brighter futures for kids with cancer. Fortunately, he had some pretty great role models to help him get started.

Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF)-funded researcher Dr. Alex Huang was one of Dan’s physicians as a kid, and one of his mentors as an adult. After receiving a Pediatric Oncology Student Training (POST) Grant in 2016 from ALSF, Dan worked on Dr. Huang’s team to help develop an approach to blocking a tumor function in order to increase the immune system’s ability to kill the cancer cell.  

And that research was only the beginning.

Now, with the help of some of the same doctors who treated him, Dan is conducting osteosarcoma research with Case Western Reserve University in pursuit of his PhD. He explains, “The more we can do to make their lives better is what we all hope to do. That's my project. I work on osteosarcoma, and I'm looking at ways we can use other therapies to target this disease.”

While his passion is both deeply personal and profoundly selfless, his story is just starting. As Dan continues to inspire others with his life experiences and conduct research that could lead to the next big breakthrough, one thing is clear: he was meant to change lives.