Live Your Life
During Kidney Cancer Awareness Month, Telix is sharing the stories of patients living with kidney cancer to highlight the ongoing need for better diagnostics and treatments.
Maggie Valdes Butera’s husband Brandon was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2021 at the age of 26. He passed away in 2024. We spoke to Maggie about their journey together, the diagnostic delays that shaped it, and why she continues to advocate for research that could give future patients more time.
Because of COVID protocols, Maggie Valdes Butera was not allowed into the emergency room. She had to drop her husband Brandon off at the door and drive home alone. He texted her updates through the night. Later that evening, the message came: doctors had found a nine-centimeter mass on his kidney.
“The feelings we felt at that time were just disbelief and confusion,” Maggie says. “I just felt helpless. I wasn’t there. He was by himself. Everything was moving so fast.”
Brandon was 26 years old. He was healthy, active, with no family history of cancer. He and Maggie were high school sweethearts and had just moved to Houston to start their life together. When the severe back pain began, they assumed it was a kidney stone.
Then a second doctor arrived and offered a different view. Brandon didn’t fit the typical profile of a kidney cancer patient, the doctor said. Perhaps the mass was an abscess, not a tumour. The recommendation was to hold off on surgery, treat with antibiotics, and wait. Kidney cancer is most commonly diagnosed in people aged 55 to 741. At 26, Brandon was an outlier.
For close to sixty days, they waited. In that time, Brandon lost more than 30 pounds. He had fevers every night. Two rounds of antibiotics did nothing.
Eventually a biopsy confirmed what the first doctor had suspected. It was cancer. Surgery followed to remove the kidney and the tumor, which had grown to more than ten centimeters during the delay.
If we had known
“If we would have known it was cancer from the very beginning, we would have gotten that surgery way sooner,” Maggie says. “Then he wouldn’t have experienced the emotional and physical pain that he went through during that time.”
Brandon’s experience illustrates one of the persistent challenges in kidney cancer: the difficulty of reaching a confident diagnosis. Current imaging techniques, including CT and MRI, cannot always reliably distinguish malignant renal masses from benign conditions.2 And when biopsies are used, around 20% fail to provide a clear result.3 For patients who fall outside the typical demographic, that ambiguity can lead to critical delays.
Even after the nephrectomy, certainty remained elusive. Maggie and Brandon believed the surgery had removed all the cancer. Just two months later, scans showed it had returned.
“The uncertainty and the unknown are definitely some of the scariest parts,” Maggie says. “Having advanced imaging would have been so crucial in providing that certainty on next steps.”
At Telix, we believe better diagnostic tools are essential to reducing the kind of delays Brandon experienced and giving physicians and patients greater diagnostic certainty, sooner.
Running out of options
Brandon was diagnosed with unclassified renal cell carcinoma (RCC) – a subtype that does not fall into more common categories like clear cell RCC. For patients with rarer subtypes, the evidence base guiding treatment decisions is thinner, and the options fewer.
“We always knew it would be trial and error,” Maggie says. “He would start one treatment, it would work for a little bit, and then it would stop working, and we would move on to the next one. What we didn’t know is how quickly we would run out of options.”
By the end, Brandon was on three treatments simultaneously as his medical team at MD Anderson Cancer Center worked to slow a cancer that had spread through his lymphatic system. For patients with advanced or recurrent kidney cancer, the burden of disease remains high, and the need for new approaches is urgent.4
Telix is exploring the therapeutic potential of advancing carbonic anhydrase IX (CAIX)-targeted radiopharmaceuticals, which aim to deliver targeted radiation directly to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue. Investigator-initiated studies led by institutions including MD Anderson Cancer Center, where Brandon was treated, are evaluating these approaches in combination with established immunotherapy agents in advanced ccRCC.5 This theranostic approach, which pairs precision diagnostics with targeted therapy using the same molecular target, has already reshaped care in prostate cancer and is now being investigated in kidney cancer.
In the last ten months of Brandon’s life, things deteriorated. The couple were planning their wedding and did not know if he would make it to the altar. He did.
In a post for the Kidney Cancer Association, Brandon described cancer as a thief that steals moments and feelings just for the hell of it, but on their wedding day, they had stolen something back. Brandon passed away in 2024. He was 29.
Just live your life
Maggie now works at the Kidney Cancer Association as Director of Development and Community Engagement, channelling her experience into advocacy and fundraising for research. She and Brandon had been advocates throughout his illness, driven by the knowledge that someone, somewhere, might be close to a breakthrough.
“I would have done anything to have more time with him,” she says. “And I know that he would have wanted the same. I just think that there’s still so much more that we have to do.”
When asked what she wants people to take from Brandon’s story, Maggie returns to some of the last words he told her in the hospital.
“One of the last things he told me was to let everyone know just to live their life, because you just never know what’s going to happen.”“And I’m definitely living my life because of him.”
Watch our interview with Maggie here
References
1. American Cancer Society. Key Statistics About Kidney Cancer. cancer.org. Updated January 2025.
2. Prognostic Factors for Localized Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma and Their Application in Adjuvant Therapy. Cancers (Basel). 2022. PMC 8750145.s
3. Renal mass biopsy non-diagnostic rates. Eur Urol Oncol. 2021.
4. Song X, Zhang Y, et al. Clinical and economic burdens of recurrence following nephrectomy for intermediate high- or high-risk RCC. J Manag Care Spec Pharm. 2022;28(10).
5. Jonasch E, et al. STARLITE-1: Phase 1b/2 study of 177Lu-girentuximab plus cabozantinib and nivolumab in treatment-naïve advanced ccRCC. Presented at ASCO Annual Meeting 2025.