Researching brain tumors to honor his brother’s legacy with Robby Teis

Robby Teis discusses the personal motivation that led him to continue his education at St. Jude. A transcript is below.

I’m the oldest of five kids, and we grew up in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The oldest of my siblings was Johnny; he’s two years younger than me. Johnny and I were just inseparable, we played sports together. We played games together, we had a big tree house that my dad built for us, in our room together we had racecar beds — we were closer than close. We did everything together.

When Johnny was eight, so I would have been 10, he was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). [DIPG is a highly aggressive, high-grade glioma that is found in the brain stem. It is currently incurable.]

We found out because he was running towards my mom during a field day, and he just started to lean to the side, and that was very unlike him because he’d always been a very athletic, coordinated kid. 

After nine months of treatment here at St. Jude, we brought him home, and a couple of months later, he passed away. After Johnny passed away, I couldn’t really find meaning in anything else. 

I really enjoyed research and kind of gravitated more towards immunotherapy and how neurons interact with the tumor. It made me realize that I could affect change at a much higher level. 

Once I realized that St. Jude had a graduate school, I was obviously very interested for personal reasons. But — getting to talk to some of the students that really loved it here, the environment, the type of research — it was an easy choice. 

Working at St. Jude means the world to me. This is exactly where I want to be.