The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund benefiting ALCMI

Not too late to purchase tickets!  
Check out www.dancingforjoan.org or call us at (404) 987-0792.

It's not too late to become a sponor of the 5th Annual Dancing for Joan presented by Northside Hospital Cancer Care!

If you or your business would like to join our list of sponsors, click here or call us at
(404) 987-0792. We have very affordable packages available.

To be included in the printed program of the event, you need to contact us by end of day on Friday, February 17th.  

You can check out our 2012 Sponsors here. 

This article was originally published by Si Cantwell on February 11th, 2012 at StarNewsOnline.com.

Taylor Bell faced a dilemma Wednesday morning as she pondered that night's big basketball game.

“I root for Carolina but Duke saved my life,” she said.

Two weeks after her 21st birthday, she was told she had a 3-centimer mass in her lung.

“I thought it was a death sentence for me,” she said.

It wasn't. She had the cancerous mass removed at Duke University Medical Center and she's been cancer-free for more than four years.

But Bell is exceptional: Only 16 percent of lung cancer patients live five years past diagnosis.

Bell wants you to know two things about lung cancer.

1. Since there are so few survivors, it's hard to create awareness and attract research dollars.
   
2. No one deserves lung cancer.
   

“When I tell people I had lung cancer, the first question is, ‘Did you smoke?'  ” she said.

She thinks that's unfair.

“You don't ask people with breast cancer, ‘How did you get breast cancer?' ”

Bell played varsity soccer for four years at New Hanover. When she graduated in 2005, she expected to play soccer at East Carolina University.

And she did during her freshman year. She began to feel a tingling and numbness in her toes. Then she couldn't pass her fitness test, a series of sprints she'd previously done without difficulty.

Eventually she left the team.

During Christmas break her sophomore year, she contracted pneumonia, then got sick again a few weeks later. The student health center took a chest X-ray, which she recently brought to the StarNews for a photo session. But no one realized it was lung cancer until the following fall.

“I was shocked and scared,” she said. Her grandmother had died of lung cancer, as had a great-grandfather and great-uncle.

Bambi MacRae, a lung cancer survivor whom I wrote about last year, helped connect Bell with Duke thoracic surgeon Thomas D'Amico.

“Keyhole surgery” pulled much of her left lung out through a small incision in November 2007. Since then, twice-yearly scans have proven negative for cancer.

Bell, who graduated in 2010 with a B.S. in political science, has become an activist and advocate.

She has appeared with D'Amico before medical providers, and traveled to Washington to lobby on behalf of lung cancer survivors.

Lung cancer takes more lives than breast, prostate and colon cancers combined, according to the National Lung Cancer Partnership.

But with the low survival rate, Bell said, “there's not a lot of people to talk about the story.”

She said there's a stigma attached to lung cancer. People tend to assume that those who suffer from it are somehow to blame.

Bell was a Division 1 college athlete. She'd never smoked and hadn't been exposed to secondhand smoke on a regular basis.

But even if she had smoked, she said, “Does that make you care less? No one deserves lung cancer.”

Bell works in Greenville as community outreach coordinator with the Carolina Well survivorship program (CarolinaWell.org), a Chapel Hill-based organization that supports cancer survivors.

Her local counterpart is LaSonia Roberts-Melvin, who says New Hanover Regional Medical Center's Zimmer Cancer Center offers a program to help survivors transition to life after cancer.

To find out more, contact Roberts-Melvin at 342-3403 or LaSonia.Roberts-Melvin@nhrmc.org.

Copyright © 2012 StarNewsOnline.com

By Charli Penn of Essence magazine.
This article was originally publshed at Essence.com
on February 10th, 2012.  
  
On November 27, 2011, former NFL star Chris Draft married the love of his life, professional dancer LaKeasha Rutledge, in an intimate and beautiful wedding ceremony surrounded by loved ones. Exactly one month later, on December 27, his wife lost her brief battle with stage 4 lung cancer, and he sat by her side as she took her last breaths. 

When we shared Draft’s heartbreaking story with you, the outpouring of support and well wishes was tremendous. Then came your questions. What can you do to help? How could this happen? A healthy, 38-year-old woman whom friends described as a “fitness nut," Rutledge never smoked a day in her life. Her diagnosis came just a year before her death, and seemingly out of nowhere. Draft, who’s continuing his fight for a cure through their organization Team Draft, must now begin to heal. ESSENCE.com sat down with him to learn what the couple’s last year together was like, and how Draft's Valentine would have wanted to be remembered.  

ESSENCE.COM: Since your wife’s passing, you’ve shown such strength and shared so much of her life with the world. Why did you choose to share her story in this way?
CHRIS DRAFT: We put the pictures up [online] so people could really see the life in her, not just how she passed away. We want people to see that her faith allowed her to live before her diagnosis, and to continue to live with it, and find the joy in each day. Even when you get bad news, you have to find the joy in life, which is definitely not easy. Most of the pictures in the montage people have seen are from the past year. She was still enjoying her friends, and still enjoying her family. Yes, it was a little different with cancer being there, but at the same time, you find a way to enjoy it. That’s where you’re at, you know?

ESSENCE: You both stayed positive throughout her battle. How were you able to do that, after learning of her diagnosis?
DRAFT: It was never, "Oh, I’m just going to smile through it." Keasha was like, “I’m going to fight. We’re going to do what we have to do to go after this.” Stage 4 lung cancer is not a good diagnosis. I mean, the numbers are horrible, and to get that news without even having a sign beforehand, makes it that much tougher. She knew she had great friends, and great family, and a great support system, and she said, “Okay, so what do I have to do to fight? We’re going to fight it each and every day.” Getting the full diagnosis, and knowing exactly what we were fighting, was a very hard process. She did such a great job of really looking at it like, "Hey, I have to do this in order to have a chance to be better." She stuck with that and continued to smile, even after she went to appointment after appointment

ESSENCE: Share a favorite memory of your time with Keasha with us.
DRAFT: I played an away game once, and she got three of her friends to help her bring this big ol’ live Christmas tree into my condo as a surprise. I came back from a long, tough day of playing, and I walk in, and I was like, "Oh my goodness." There was the most beautiful, perfect tree right there in my living room. It was the absolute example of what it means to actually be playing in the league and still have your woman right there with you, supporting you, and it was a tremendous feeling. When you're away sometimes your family can’t be there, or you travel for holidays and they have to come to you, but she made it where Christmas was there, and I was home. It was so beautiful. I was looking at the pictures the other day and the tree was so big -- actually bigger than I remember. She liked surprises. That same Christmas she put together this scrapbook for me that had pictures from the season, articles that talked about my community work, and photos from my family. It was perfect. The great thing about her was that she really paid attention to the little things. She appreciated all of who I am, not just me, the football player.

ESSENCE: What types of things did you enjoy doing together?
DRAFT: She’d find a new place to go to dinner, and be sure we went there, or we’d just take a romantic walk in the park -- as long as we were spending time together, that’s what mattered. I wouldn’t call us homebodies, but we definitely loved a good movie or meal. We’d always go to the movies or enjoy a meal together. If she was gonna cook, she’d cook from scratch, and really cook. She made the best red velvet cake ever. She added to her arsenal a carrot cake too. The red velvet was so good, it made you just want to eat a whole bunch of it. It’d have to be a special occasion for her to make one, though, because you just couldn’t have that much cake around – it was just too good. 

ESSENCE: Was your wedding day everything you dreamed it would be? You both looked so happy in your video.
DRAFT: I wanted her to just be able to really enjoy it. That was my only focus. She was able to get up. She was able to walk. She was able to dance. Dancing was just her. Her 88-year-old grandmother got up at our wedding and she started dancing, and she got Keasha back up and she started dancing too. The weather was perfect. It was 70 degrees on Thanksgiving weekend – wow. It seemed like everything just worked itself out for her. It was so beautiful. Her friends and family were all able to be there. It was a good day -- a good weekend. 

ESSENCE: If you could send out a message to Keasha this Valentine’s Day, what would you want her to know?
DRAFT: [Long pause.] Keasha, I‘ll always love you. We’re gonna keep fighting. We’re gonna keep fighting! We’re gonna keep inspiring people and help to change people’s lives, I promise.

ESSENCE: How would she want you to live your life and honor her legacy?
DRAFT: She wanted to be an inspiration to other people. She really wanted to try to make sure that people saw her for who she was and to see a woman with a beautiful spirit. I have to finish making sure everything is in order as I move forward. She would want me to be happy, to smile, and to move forward and stay close with her family and friends. That’s what I’m doing 

ESSENCE: What's next for Team Draft?
DRAFT: Right now, with Team Draft our goal is to change the face of lung cancer. We want people to see that anybody can get lung cancer, and the cure for it is just as critical as breast cancer, or any cancer. We’ve got to find a way to identify it earlier. She was this strong, healthy woman, who was all of a sudden short of breath. Had she caught it during stage 3, instead of 4, it could have really increased her chances of survival. We’re going to celebrate her life and the type of person she was and we want others to grab hold of her spirit and make a difference. There’s no clear answer in terms of what can be done to identify it early enough. Keasha didn’t smoke, she was a dancer, she was fit, and she was healthy. That’s why people need to see faces like hers and continue to be inspired. We want to build an excitement about making a difference. I want to put a picture of Keasha right in front of researchers' faces, so when the doctors and scientists are doing their research, they see her right there smiling, and it can hopefully give them that little extra push. If we could push things ahead, and give someone else another week, it makes a huge difference. Team Draft was launched at our wedding. She wanted to fight. She wanted to stand up. Continuing this allows her to do that.

Roughly 25 percent of lung cancer cases show no symptoms at all.  For more information on lung cancer and to learn how you can help spread Rutledge’s message of hope, contact Team Draft today.

Watch the ESPN feature here:  http://www.gaetafund.org/keasha-rutledge-draft.html

Please watch this very powerful, very touching video produced by ESPN and originally aired during their Super Bowl XLVI pre-game coverage on February 5th, 2012.  Respond and donate at www.teamdraft.org. 

This interview was published at www.fastcures.org, as part of the "TRAIN" (The Research Acceleration and Innovation Network) Innovator Spotlight.  The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Fund is proud to benefit ALCMI.  If you live in the Atlanta area, come out on February 25th and go "Dancing for Joan" to raise funds for the work ALCMI is doing!

Q: What prompted the creation of the institute?

In late 2007, the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation invited leading physicians, clinicians, scientists, researchers, representatives from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, venture capitalists, international investors, and lung cancer survivors to convene at a Summit. They were invited for one purpose - to answer the following question: "If money for research and development was not a barrier and a true collaboration could be achieved, what would you do to improve lung cancer patient survival in the least amount of time and how much would it cost?" 

The unanimous answer: "We need a national lung cancer institute - an honest third-party broker - with a virtual specimen repository, connecting existing biobanks and researchers worldwide through a unique real-time IT platform and better means of collaboration." In response, the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute (ALCMI, voiced as "Alchemy") was founded in 2008 by lung cancer survivor Bonnie J. Addario and supporters to positively impact on lung cancer patient survival. 

ALCMI is a contractual consortium of academic and community-based researchers structured to directly advance the understanding of disease biology and accelerate the development of significantly more effective treatment options. ALCMI links researchers via shared infrastructures and prioritized research programs including standardized biorepositories, data systems, contracts, study protocols, and, as significantly, through ongoing collaboration discussions among the scientists.

Q: Can you briefly describe ALCMI's CASTLE Network and what you hope its outcomes will be?

The Collaborative Advanced Stage Tissue Lung Cancer (CASTLE) Network is the only resource of its kind that facilitates the ongoing (longitudinal) collection of matched tissue core biopsies/blood samples from advanced lung cancer patients coupled with routine determination of a panel of documented clinically significant biomarkers. In addition, it goes beyond this to centrally integrate and standardize research tissue samples with corresponding proteomic, genomic, molecular and clinical data across a multitude of institutions and oncology networks in the United States and (soon) Europe. This kind of transformative research resource (defined as a large, well-annotated, uniformly collected, fresh flash-frozen collection of advanced stage lung cancer tissues) simply does not exist anywhere else. These unique resources are being applied to identify and validate optimal molecular targets and drugs/agents active against biologic and molecular targets, as well as enabling correlative studies to determine patients' responses to standard of care and emerging therapies.

ALCMI is helping to lead the way as the lung cancer research community's premier, open access source for high quality proteomics, genomics, target validation and correlative science analyses. The biorepository resulting from CASTLE, with funding support from foundations and other philanthropic sources, establishes a unique foundation for collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, other research organizations, and the biopharmaceutical industry - thus bringing new and improved treatment options to lung cancer patients in need.

Q: You've put a lot of emphasis on educating and empowering patients about molecular testing. Why is that important?

Because of the historically poor outcomes of lung cancer patients, suboptimal therapeutic efficacy, significant side effects of chemotherapy, and the need to choose more efficacious treatment regimens and identify patients most likely to benefit from them, there is a need to predict a priori whether an individual patient's tumor will respond to a particular therapeutic agent. However, virtually all lung cancer tumor samples available today are from resection specimens so direct, intra-patient molecular-clinical therapy correlations are impossible. 

Patients with more advanced disease, those who are determined to be medically inoperable, and patients whose cancer recurs after surgery, are treated with chemotherapeutic agents, radiotherapy, or a chemotherapy and radiotherapy combination. Only a minority of tumors show objective clinical responses to chemotherapy: the best regimens can induce a clinical response in about 30 to 40 percent of tumors, while targeted inhibitors induce an objective response in about 10 percent of cases. The result is that the survival expectation of advanced stage (comprising 85 percent of all initial diagnoses) lung cancer patients is measured in months, and that the overall five-year survival rate for all patients has remained under 16 percent over the last 40 years. 

More promisingly, specific molecular features of tumors, particularly EGFR mutations and EML4-ALK fusions, have been shown in multiple studies to have prognostic importance and/or be associated with benefit from specific interventions. Our CASTLE study provides immediate access to molecular markers, thus arming physicians and patients with vital data resulting in improved patient outcomes via customized treatments.

Q: What are your top research goals for 2012, and what will it take to reach those goals?


* Address the scarcity of well-annotated, uniformly collected and processed tissues

• Expand ALCMI's membership to include many more community hospitals, thus bringing research to the patients and vice-versa
  
• Triple the number of enrolling CASTLE sites in the United States in early 2012; launch the study in Europe
  
• Develop and implement other molecularly-oriented biospecimen initiatives, such as familial (inherited) molecular screening studies
  

* Improve the understanding of the molecular/genetic causes & mechanisms of lc:

• Broaden molecular profiling with advanced bioinformatics for validation of molecular signatures and pathway activations
  
• Recruit/engage motivated investigators from diverse scientific disciplines to generate new and even more innovative projects
  

* Identify and validate optimal molecular targets and facilitate the development of effective, targeted therapies:

• Correlate drug responses to the specific molecular roadmap of the individual patient
  

* Accelerate advancement of promising compounds/agents from the lab to the clinic:

• Accelerate therapies from the lab to patients via molecularly-informed clinical trials to improve patient outcomes
  

Learn more about ALCMI by viewing Steven Young's presentation at the 2011 Partnering for Cures meeting.

The following story was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle on
January 26th, 2012 by Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer.

SAN FRANCISCO -- In a finding that could improve the survival odds for early-stage lung cancer patients, UCSF researchers determined a new molecular test can predict more accurately than current diagnostic methods which tumors are more likely to be aggressive and turn deadly.

The study results, published today in the medical journal The Lancet, come from the two largest clinical trials ever conducted on the molecular genetics of lung cancer and included early-stage patients from Northern California Kaiser hospitals as well as from China.

In both trial groups, a 14-gene test, which was based on developments originally made at UCSF but created by a Mountain View company, was able to accurately determine a patient's odds of death within five years of surgery by analyzing the biological makeup of the tumor.

This potentially could save lives by helping patients with early-stage but "bad" disease decide after surgery to remove tumors whether to undergo additional treatment such as chemotherapy or targeted radiation, the researchers said.

Dr. David Jablons, chief of UCSF's thoracic oncology program and an author of the study, called the results a breakthrough for earlier-stage patients who have tough treatment decisions to make.

"It can help enhance the chance of curing more patients and this is not an insignificant problem," he said. "This is 50,000 patients in the U.S. alone or more a year and hundreds of thousands of patients a year worldwide."

Most deadly cancer

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death in the United States as well as the world. More people die each year from lung cancer - some 160,000 people in this country alone - than from breast, colon and prostate cancers combined.

One reason it's so deadly is that lung cancer is caught in the early stages in only about 30 percent of those who are diagnosed. Also, unlike other types of cancer where early diagnosis can increase survival upwards of 90 percent, as high as 45 percent of people with the earliest stage of lung cancer die within five years, despite seemingly successful surgery.

"The fact of the matter is people do not do well in general, even with early-stage lung cancer," said Jablons. He said current methods of detecting and staging the disease - using scans, surgery and clinical observation - are insufficient to determine the aggressive nature of the disease.

The molecular assay, developed by Mountain View's Pinpoint Genomics, analyzes the activity level of the 14 genes in preserved tissue samples as compared to levels in the normal lung. It then characterizes whether that tumor poses a high, intermediate or low risk of death for the patient.

This study - which was based on tissue samples from 433 Northern California Kaiser patients and 1,006 patients from China - and found that the test very accurately predicted the likelihood of death in both groups.

"There really hasn't been a tool to more clearly identify the patients who have the more difficult biology," said David Berryman, Pinpoint's chief executive officer. "The key to it is to really hone in on a specific set of genes that would be a prognosticator of progression or more aggressive disease."

Ready for market

Berryman said the test, which received the proper approvals last year, is commercially available but the company has been waiting until these results before moving forward with it. He said he hopes Medicare and health insurers will cover the test as those payers have with other gene-based tests.

Health experts say the test is most similar to the diagnostic test Oncotype DX, which can identify the high-risk breast cancer patients who will benefit most from chemotherapy.

But what the research involving the Pinpoint test doesn't yet show is whether additional therapy following surgery for lung-cancer patients actually improves survival rates for those patients.

"Knowing this result will have benefit (to the patient) is the real question of course," said Stephen Van Den Eeden, research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research in Oakland.

Additional research is also needed to identify which chemotherapies would be most beneficial, although genetic testing to identify certain mutations that respond to specific lung cancer therapies is already available.

While the studies were funded by Pinpoint and private endowments to UCSF, researchers stressed that they were conducted under strict guidelines and using blinded conditions to prevent bias.

Bonnie Addario, a lung cancer survivor and founder of the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation in San Carlos, called the research "fabulous news" that she expects will lead to better, more targeted therapies for patients in the advent of personalized medicine.

"Just a few short years ago, deciding what chemotherapy to give a patient was like throwing spaghetti at the wall," Addario said. "Now we have a much better idea which regimens to put patients on. We're at the tip of the iceberg, but it's moving fast and very exciting."

Lung Cancer Statistics

An estimated 226,160 new cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed this year in the United States and about 160,340 people will die of the disease. About a third of those are diagnosed in the early stages.

Nearly 7 percent of people born today will be diagnosed with lung cancer during their lifetime.

Lung cancer claims an estimated 1.4 million lives worldwide every year.

$10.3 billion is spent in the United States each year on lung cancer treatment.

The National Cancer Institute, the nation's principal agency for cancer research, invested $281.9 million in lung cancer research in 2010. That same year, it invested $300.5 million in prostate cancer and $631.2 million in breast cancer research.

Sources: National Cancer Institute; World Health Organization.
E-mail Victoria Colliver at vcolliver@sfchronicle.com   

This article was originally published on January 26th, 2012 in Concordiensis, the student newspaper of Union College in Schenectady, New York by Jessica Doran.
-------

“Smoking kills.” It’s a typical phrase that has been ingrained in the minds of young and old people alike to denote that smoking causes lung cancer. This is very true, but it also causes people to be ignorant as to how lung cancer can affect even those who do not smoke, have never smoked or never even touched a cigarette. This is the case of Tonya Martinez-Hilton, who passed away in December after a battle with lung cancer.

Lung cancer kills 160,000 people a year, and what many do not realize is that these are more lives lost than due to breast, pancreatic and colon cancer. However, the quality of care for lung cancer patients is affected because of the smoking stigma. Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, but shortly behind it in causes are radon exposure and genetics. Radon accumulation in a house that rises above a certain level can reek havoc on a persons lungs without them even knowing.

The quality of care that is given to lung cancer patients suffers because it is assumed that they have done this to themselves. But even the effects of secondhand smoke from the previous generations can have damaging repercussions on anyone who comes into its path.

The bottom line is that lung cancer is very rarely caught and stopped in the early stages. It is often not detected until the later stages, when the tumor can have metastasized into a problem that is extremely difficult to eradicate because it has spread to other parts of the body.

Mike Hilton, Tonya’s husband, has made it a personal quest to not only extensively research everything about lung cancer, but to make it a goal that screening and proceedings for detecting the disease are found promptly.

“My wife had a history of lung cancer, but no doctor ever asked her about it or made an effort to get anything checked out,” he said. Chest x-rays alone can detect only large masses, so by the time that is caught, the tumor has probably metastasized. Hilton hopes that CT scans become part of protocol for medical proceedings so that tumors are found early.

Hilton is involved with the Bonnie Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, based in California. They focus on fundraising and grants, and have their own medical research facility. He is their East Coast representative, and has already looked into instituting a program of early lung cancer screenings at Ellis Hospital.

“If we even had one program in Schenectady County, a test run of an early screening program, we could see how the numbers of lung cancers survivors would rise. Visible change could help us to spread the program,” he said.

The foundation is also putting pressure on legislature, particularly the Lung Cancer Mortality Reduction Act, a bill that has not yet been passed but which serves to provide better guidance to medical professionals.

If this money is allocated properly, more funds can be used to support new-age treatments that have shown promise in recent years. Among these, there is new, targeted chemotherapy that affects the receptors within the tumor itself to stop it from growing. In addition to other drugs and vaccines that has been shown to increase life expectancy up to 44 months. Many of these are in the later stages of FDA approval.

However, above all, the future of lung cancer treatment lies in early detection and in stage one diagnosis. Hilton made it clear that he is hoping to see lung cancer treated as a manageable disease within the next few years.

This is where he petitions to the Union community. There are many people on this campus involved in the pre-medical field, with a commitment to achieving true change.

“If they go into the medical field, this is what they need to focus on,” Hilton said. “Your generation are the minds of the future who are going to put horrible diseases like cancer to rest for good.”

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Just two months shy of marking its 7-year anniversary, BJALCF announced today that it has awarded over $1 million in grants for 2012 Lung Cancer Research. BJALCF has made a promise to the Lung Cancer Community to fund only immediate results-oriented projects or programs promising to catalyze progress through early detection, genetic testing, drug discovery and patient-focused outcomes. Just ask any one of the BJALCF Lung Cancer survivors, family members or friends fighting for survival--or any of those who have lost someone they love way too soon to this horrific and most-underfunded #1 Cancer Killer, why results-oriented projects are of the essence? BJALCF's ultimate goal is to turn Lung Cancer into a survivable, manageable chronic disease.

After rigorous review of 26 grant requests by the BJALCF Scientific Advisory Board, much-needed funding has been distributed worldwide to the brightest, most dedicated, and determined researchers in the urgent quest to extend lives. They are as follows:

• Guoan Chen, PhD, assistant research professor in Thoracic Oncology at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the "Discovery and Validation of Serum Micro-RNAs for Lung Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis" with the primary objective to detect Lung Cancer earlier and significantly reduce the mortality of NSCLC.
• Rolf Craven, PhD, associate professor, Department of Molecular and Biomedical Pharmacology at Markey Cancer Center College of Medicine in Lexington, Kentucky for "S2R (Pgrmc1): sigma-2 receptor as a therapeutic target in Lung Cancer" with the primary objective to develop new therapeutic and diagnostic strategies for erlotinib-resistant Lung Cancer.
• Carlo Maley, PhD, associate professor and director of the Center for Evolution and Cancer at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Natalie Lui, MD, a surgery resident in the Thoracic Oncology Program in the Department of Surgery at UCSF, for "Within Tumor Genetic Diversity in Lung Cancer" with the primary objective to determine whether genetic diversity at treatment predicts survival in patients with adenocarcinoma, ultimately leading to a greater understanding of Lung Cancer's response to therapy and a new method for predicting survival.
• Jiantao Pu, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine for "Diagnosis-by-Search: Enabling Early Detection & Accurate Diagnosis of Lung Cancer" with the primary objective to develop a novel computer-aided diagnosis paradigm leading to a significant reduction of Lung Cancer mortality.

Young Investigator Awards via Jill's Legacy(TM):

• James Kim, MD, PhD, assistant professor at the Harmon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research, Dallas, TX for the "Role of Hedgehog pathway activity in human Lung Cancer with mutant K-ras" with the primary objective to determine the relationship between mutant K-ras and the Hh pathway and identify other Hh-dependent proteins that may be important for tumor growth leading to new protein targets for potential therapeutic regimens for treatment for K-ras mutant cancers.
• Naveen Kommajosyula, PhD, research fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts for "PARP Inhibition in NSCLC" with the primary objective to determine the basis of PARP inhibitor sensitivity; and, through data obtained, identify NSCLC appropriate for PARP inhibitors in clinical trials, characterize these mutations and discover Lung Cancers harboring deleterious ATM mutations sensitive to PARP inhibitors.

Ongoing Funding Extensions:

• Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute (ALCMI)- ALCMI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with offices in California and Connecticut and member institutions in the U.S. and Europe, dedicated to catalyzing and accelerating the discovery, development and delivery of new and more effective treatment options for Lung Cancer patients. In response to widely-acknowledged and systematic barriers to progress against Lung Cancer, ALCMI developed and launched, as its inaugural research program, a targeted, multi-institutional biorepository. The purpose of this project is to facilitate application of the known biomarkers to patients presenting today, and to establish such a collection of biospecimens that will be essential for discovering and validating new biomarkers for improved diagnostics, treatments and cancer patient outcomes.
• David R. Gandara, MD, professor of Medicine, Division of Hematology/Oncology, Associate Director for Clinical Research, and Director, Thoracic Oncology Program at UC Davis Cancer Center, California for the "Personalizing Therapy of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer through a novel Co-Clinical Trial Concept: A trans-Disciplinary Pilot Project" with the primary objective to use mouse tumor xenografts as surrogates for treatment outcomes in individual patients. As seen on PBS NEWSHOUR (link to: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june12/cancer_01-13.html )
• Rafael Rosell, MD, PhD, head of the Medical Oncology Service and Scientific Director for Oncology at the Catalan Institute of Oncology, Hospital Germans i Pujol, Barcelona, Spain for continued support for his work with patients included in the EURTAC trial which is the only study comparing the outcome to EGFR TKIs versus chemotherapy and the specific examination of the EGFR T790M acquired resistance mutation with the primary objective to discover novel treatment combinations for Lung Cancer patients and to extend lives.
• Giorgio Scagliotti, MD, PhD, full professor of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Turino, Italy-Department of Clinical and Biological Sciences for continued support for the "Phase III Multicenter Randomized Trial Comparing Adjuvant Pharmacogenomic-Driven Chemotherapy versus Standard Adjuvant Chemotherapy in Completely Resected Stage II-IIIA Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer conducted in 25 sites in Italy, Germany and Poland."

Board Member Bruce Gellman explains, "We're improving the standard of care by bringing new and improved treatment options to Lung Cancer patients in need. The future of cancer care lies in the concept of 'personalized medicine' - a model that focuses on the individual, not just the disease. It will use molecular signatures to match the right patients to the right drugs." Bonnie J. Addario, Founder and 7-year Lung Cancer survivor, believes in making that happen sooner rather than later. BJALCF has grown to fund progress that brings the future right into the present day. "ANYONE CAN GET LUNG CANCER," says Addario, "It can come to your house and we're choosing to fund and accelerate research that can either keep it out or kick it out. All people, all of us, with any cancer or disease like Breast Cancer and AIDS should be treated in the very best way that is available. Today, if you present with Breast Cancer, you are given molecular testing for your biomarkers and treated based on your very own specific molecular profile. It works. And we've got it for Lung Cancer. I remind our researchers that when they're looking through that microscope, they're not looking at a tumor, they're looking at a person, and that person wants to live. Our goal is to raise the bar for the existing standard of Lung Cancer care, ensure that everyone gets genetic testing and available treatment, and fund the kinds of research that bring the survival rate of Lung Cancer up into the 90th percentile, just like Breast Cancer and the AIDS cocktails. We can do this."

For more information about the grants or to learn more about how you can participate in eradicating Lung Cancer in our lifetime, please visit www.lungcancerfoundation.org . To arrange interviews with the researchers, Bonnie J. Addario, Lung Cancer Survivor and Founder, Wells Whitney, ScD, Chair of the BJALCF Scientific Advisory Board, Scott Santarella, President and CEO, and/or our growing army of Lung Cancer Survivors, please contact Sheila Von Driska at 415.357.1278 or sheila@lungcancerfoundation.org. Your mighty pen can help.

SOURCE Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation

Copyright (C) 2012 PR Newswire. All rights reserved 

This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.