JJ Singleton was a 27-year-old athlete from the small Appalachian town in North Carolina, when he was diagnosed with aggressive colorectal cancer. His story highlights the alarming rise of early-onset colorectal cancer, a disease now the leading cause of cancer death for men under 50.

Growing up in a rural community where going to the doctor was often avoided and early death was dismissed as "God's will," JJ wasn’t diagnosed with colon cancer until a visible tumor throbbed in his abdomen. His journey from brutal chemotherapy failures to a life-stabilizing immunotherapy clinical trial at Duke is a powerful testament to the promise of precision medicine—turning terminal cancer into a manageable chronic condition.

Yet, his story also exposes a critical cancer care disparity: the immense difficulty rural patients face in accessing the ve ...