Swimming champion's fight for time highlights life and death struggle

High achieving Archie Goodburn helps carry the fight over access to cancer drugs to Scotland's medical authorities

Swimming champion Archie Goodburn in action

Archie Goodburn leads a fast-paced and high-achieving life; a British Swimming champion and current Scottish record holder, as well as a Masters student in Chemical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. As he continues to compete in swimming, just this week setting a new all-time record in both the 50 & 100 m breaststroke events at British Universities and Colleges Sport, you’d never guess that a terminal diagnosis looms over his life.

He has been given new hope for his life by an emerging medicine, and he’s now fighting for others to be able to access it too.

Archie Goodburn’s story

In May 2024, aged 22, Goodburn was diagnosed with low-grade IDH mutant oligodendroglioma; a kind of slow-growing brain cancer. He has three brain tumours distributed across both sides of his brain. These tumours were not growing when he was diagnosed, but he knew that at some point they would grow and eventually end his life; the median survival for his kind of brain cancer is 12 to 15 years.

Oligodendroglioma is diagnosed in around 350 people every year in the UK, and constitutes around 2-5% of all brain or spinal cord tumours. The usual treatment approach for this kind of cancer is to remove as much as possible through surgery; after this the remaining tumours are treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Both chemo and radiotherapy have significant impacts on a patient’s quality of life, such as cognitive impairment or, in some cases, secondary cancers. For this reason, chemotherapy or radiotherapy treatment is started as late as possible to maximise how long a patient can live without the side-effects of these treatments.

While most oligodendrogliomas can be operated on, Goodburn’s is particularly rare in that it is inoperable; this means that for him, the only option was “active surveillance”- monitor the tumours, and start aggressive treatments as late as possible.

“I was under active surveillance, and it was going okay, but my quality of life, in terms of stress, was just through the roof…. every day you’re on the look out for progression of symptoms, because it’s not that it might grow, it’s going to grow,” he says.

‘Like having a smouldering bonfire’

Goodburn’s mother found the necessity to wait without treating the cancer extremely difficult: “It’s like having a little smouldering bonfire, somebody’s standing there with a fire extinguisher, and you feel like saying, can you just put the bloody fire extinguisher on the smouldering flames now, rather than waiting for the bonfire.”