Dennis Massimo doesn't remember when he signed up for the Penn Medicine BioBank, but his sister Lauren Massimo, PhD, CRNP, does. It was 2016, Dennis, then 33, was getting his tonsils out, and Lauren encouraged him to consent to his blood sample being banked for future research.
Lauren, an associate professor of Nursing at Penn with an appointment in Neurology, where she co-directs the University of Pennsylvania Frontotemporal Degeneration Center, was used to being her family's trusted health advocate. That decision may have saved his life.
Fast forward to April 2025.
Dennis, now 42 and working as a construction estimator, kept getting-and ignoring-calls from the BioBank. Having no memory of signing up for it nine years earlier, he assumed the calls were spam or a sales pitch. Finally, on April 14, he picked up the phone.
Dennis learned that a research project using samples from the BioBank found something called an MSH2 gene mutation in his DNA. As soon as he hung up the phone, he called Lauren. The siblings were already close, and this new medical information would only bring the family closer. Dennis and his wife, Carla, live essentially next door to Lauren and her husband, Kevin, in West Chester, PA, and their kids spend hours playing in the yard with their cousins.
Soon they learned that Dennis had Lynch syndrome, a condition that puts him at an increased risk for cancer. As if that wasn't enough news, a tumor was already silently growing in his colon: stage III colorectal cancer that likely wouldn't have been discovered and treated for years, had Dennis not followed his sister's urging and signed up for the BioBank.
"I found out when the cancer was stage III and not stage IV," he said. "It really could have saved my life."
