Outpouring of Support Gives Hope Against Cancer

Thanks to an outpouring of support from philanthropists, people from all walks of life, corporations and public-spirited organizations across the country, we have a chance to strike a real blow against cancer, which still claims more than half a million American lives each year. For me, as for so many, the fight is personal.

Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), the charitable initiative launched in May 2008, announced the first round of three-year grants this week, totaling $73.6 million. The money is going to SU2C "Dream Teams" of top scientists at different institutions to help them get promising new treatments to cancer patients -- and do it fast.

Cancer took both of my parents -- my father died of lung cancer in 2005 and my mother of ovarian cancer just two years later. I have many friends who are contending with the disease, and we will all somehow be touched by cancer some day.

I am privileged to run the Entertainment Industry Foundation, the collective philanthropy for the television and film businesses. We've been part of an extraordinary coalescing of people within the entertainment community around two ambitious goals this past year: convey to the American people that we are on the cusp of great advances in cancer research, if only we can all come together to support this research; and facilitate new and better ways for scientists doing the research to work together. From the person who can contribute $1 to the corporations and philanthropists who can make a multi-million dollar gift, each and every one of us can make a difference.

ABC, CBS and NBC led the way by donating the air time for a simultaneously broadcast fundraising special last September, and over 100 people from the film, TV and music worlds volunteered their time to participate. Sheryl Crow, Christina Applegate and Melissa Etheridge, wearing shirts with the simple word "survivor," sang, standing side by side. Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams reported on promising cancer research. Patrick Swayze, Meryl Streep, Beyoncé, James Taylor, Robin Roberts, Salma Hayek, Jimmy Fallon, Dana Delany, Forest Whitaker and many, many others took part.

Donors at all levels responded enthusiastically, and after the broadcast, $100 million had been raised for cancer research programs.

Raising the money was one challenge; devising a model for investing the funds in projects with the greatest potential to bear fruit in a compressed time-frame is quite another. Our scientific partner, the prestigious American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and a core group of scientists developed a roadmap centered on getting new therapies to patients quickly. The clear starting point was that Stand Up To Cancer will fund only "translational" research, which is all about moving science out of the lab and into real-world treatments in the clinic, where they can save cancer patients' lives.

The plan was designed to hit impediments to progress head on, such as the natural boundaries and competitiveness that can exist between research centers. Requiring the "best and the brightest," both from different institutions and disciplines, to collaborate is at the heart of SU2C's Dream Team approach.

When Nobel Laureate Phillip A. Sharp of MIT signed on to chair the committee that would recommend which teams be funded, other august scientists quickly followed. Painstakingly narrowing the initial 237 team ideas to five team grant recipients was a complicated, time-consuming and -- particularly for the finalists -- uniquely interactive process.

The five teams chosen include more than 200 researchers, with representatives from cancer advocacy groups participating to ensure that the patient's point of view is always taken into account. The projects touch on many of the most innovative areas in cancer research, which increasingly focus on deciphering genetic and cellular events that cause cancers to occur and allow them to spread, and on developing interventions that will prevent or reverse these events.

Sherry Lansing, Katie Couric, Laura Ziskin, Noreen Fraser, Rusty Robertson, Sue Schwartz, Ellen Ziffren and Kathleen Lobb are the core group, as well as myself, from the entertainment and media businesses who worked to develop SU2C. For Laura and Noreen, this is intensely personal as they are cancer survivors. As a tribute to my parents and on behalf of my colleagues, as well as everyone else in our industry and all the scientists involved, I can tell you we are in it for the long haul. And we hope the American people will be, too. The breadth and number of proposals that were received points to how many promising projects are out there going unfunded. Donating to support cancer research, especially in today's economy, is challenging, but working together, we can all stand up to cancer, ending it once and for all.

Please visit www.standup2cancer.org.

Comments

[David Wild - Huffpost Blogger]

Lisa --

Thanks so much for all you do and the passion you bring to this cause

[Conk]

Can't really add much more to what Insulin stated. Spot on Insulin, well said.

[Insulin]

The cancer industry, along with the plague of high tech medicine, is the single biggest reason why the war on cancer is such terrible failure
By refusing to allow the far more effective forms of treatments from alternative medicine to be recognized as bonafide treatments the proven failures of chemical poisoning and radiation burning have for over 50 years monopolized cancer treatment and research. The result has been great wealth for the cancer industry despite the horrible treatment failures.
The last thing that is needed is the continued lack of democracy in medical practice. No more new variations of the same old cut, radiate and burn proven failures should be tolerated any longer. Unless the full recognition of altenative medicine is recognized and the racketeering of high profit, failed patent treatments exposed, the cancer plague will continue to grow.
The only reasearch that is necessary is the social research which provides indisputable evidence that conventional medicine is a proven failure. New systems of modern are what needed not new kinds of the same old failed toxic treatments. The public must demand an end to disease mongering quack monoplistic no cure medicine. The only solution is democracy in medicine and full access to results based evidence medicine - which if done would force 95% of the current system to to discontinued and replaced by non toxic alternative medicine.

[zagyzebra]

This isn't something I talk about much. Almost nobody but my immediate family knows I was diagnosed with cancer more than a decade ago. But it needs to be pointed out that an extremely sensible cancer treatment already exists. It originated in Mexico three generations of doctors ago, and is now being practiced by hundreds of trained doctors around the world, including many in the United States. The treatment is Insulin Potentiated Therapy, or, more commonly, IPT.

The hundreds of millions of dollars your organization is giving to science for cancer research needs to start first with a doctor in Tijuana by the name of Dr. Donato Perez Garcia III, who learned IPT from his father, a doctor, who in turn learned the therapy from his own father, the pioneering Dr. Garcia who invented the treatment. Three generations of doctors later, the youngest, Dr. Donato Perez Garcia III, has been quietly training doctors all over the world, who collectively have THOUSANDS of cancer patients who have been SUCCESSFULLY treated by IPT. I should know. I am one of them.

Any serious examination into current real-life success stories needs to begin with those who have been treated with IPT. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have discovered Dr. Donato, or any doctor he has trained in the use of IPT, owe it to the rest of the world to spread the word.

[Halsey]

yes and no insulin...­.I researched the chemicals used in my ACT chemo..and every last one was based on a plant that comes out of the Rain Forest...t­he CURE for cancer is somewhere, on a bush, in Brazil...i­f "we" keep destroying our future..we may well destroy that true cure... so..we all have a choice...M­cDonald's hamburgers­...or a cure for cancer... cattle now live on much of what WAS this important area... I have cancer...a­nd refuse to eat any meat...I will NOT contribute to the destruction of the one area that may hold the secret to a cure... join me?

[zaz33]

Show me the $$$$$ and we'll come up with a money making way to treat cancer.

Meat is the fertilizer for cancer (that's why Asian's have much lower rates)

What may be coming to America is a treatment developed in Japan. Targeted microwave beams to heat the cells above approx 107 degrees. Cancer cells die from this heat whereas normal cells don't.

Cancer cells are actually weak and cannot tolerate oxygen and heat. This knowledge has been around for years and should be the approach for a CURE.

The search for a cure must include the holistic, natural, and DIET approach (my opinion)

[tom928]

Vegetarians get cancer too. I know.

[zaz33]

How about animal protein ?

Eggs, butter, cheese, fish, milk, ect.

The diet recommended is "plant based"

I know too, and refuse to be cut, poisoned, and burned.

[TonyOnly]

"For me, as for so many, the fight is personal." - My condolences to you for your parents. I lost my sister to breast cancer in 1994, my mother to breast cancer 18 months later and my father to liver cancer 18 months after that. But I understand that our stories are not unique and you`re right when you say "...we will all somehow be touched by cancer some day." I applaud your Stand Up To Cancer initiative and I`m sure that kind of research funding will lead to many successes. Cancer is not just one battle, it`s many battles on different fronts.