Comedian Alex Duong has died after a year-long battle with a rare and aggressive cancer. He was 42.
"With the heaviest hearts, we share that our dear Alex passed away peacefully this morning, surrounded by love and dear friends," friend Hilarie Steele wrote in a March 28 update shared on Duong's GoFundMe page. "He was comfortable and thankfully out of pain."
The prior day, Steele said, Duong went into septic shock in the hospital and was "fighting for his life."
Duong's alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma diagnosis came after he developed a headache at the beginning of 2025 and one day others noticed his left eye was bulging, he told the Los Angeles Times last year. He lost vision in his affected eye and within months owed $400,000 in medical costs. Duong's cancer, which required extensive radiation and chemotherapy, eventually metastasized to his spine, and he was "bedridden" as of February.
Alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, an "aggressive" soft-tissue tumor that usually affects children, has "high local recurrence and metastasis tendency" in adults and "has the worst prognosis" of rhabdomyosarcoma diagnoses, according to a 2019 report in the International Journal of Applied and Basic Medical Research.
