Funding Approach
One of our Foundation’s goals is to develop, execute, and monitor a strategic, highly responsive grant program that will move quickly to eradicate Lung Cancer through early detection, research, education, prevention and treatment. The Foundation will make grants to support these mutli-disciplinary areas.
Early Detection and Prevention
A major focus of the Foundation’s support goal is for Early Detection.Today, 85% of patients diagnosed with Lung Cancer in the United States will die from it within 5 years. With over 165,000 deaths per year, this makes lung cancer the number one cancer killer in America, claiming more lives than breast, colon, and prostate cancer combined.
The battle against Lung Cancer is not, however, lost. Hope has been found in the early detection of Lung Cancer with annual CT screening of high-risk individuals. Annual screening with CT scans can find Lung Cancers in their earliest stage, when up to 92% can be cured. Read more at the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program (I-ELCAP) website.
Since the National Cancer Act was passed to change the survival rate for all cancers 38 years ago, breast cancer reached a survival rate of 89%. Prostate cancer: 99.9%. Lung cancer, the deadliest of all cancers, was inexplicably left behind…with an overall survival rate of 15.5%. Technology for Lung Cancer detection exists in the same way breast cancer had the mammogram…prostate cancer…the PSA…the spiral CT scan exists for Lung Cancer. The CT scan is not perfect, but it’s all we have today. We are always on the lookout to fund promising saliva, breathilizer and blood tests, but even with those, the CT scan will not go away.
Research and Treatment
Among many others, the Foundation supports the research of Dr. David Jablons, co-founder of BJALCF and Program Director and Ada Endowed Chair for Thoracic Oncology at UCSF. One example of a cutting-edge research project Jablons and his team are studying is a genetic pathway called Wnt, which has proven to be critical in tumor growth. In normal cell development, the Wnt passage is active during the cell’s early stages when it is dividing and growing and becomes inactive once the cell reaches maturity. In malignant mesothelioma cells, however, the pathway is abnormally activated after the cell has matured. Funds can be used to identify effective means of disabling the Wnt pathway in these tumor cells. By shutting down the pathway, it is suspected that tumors will shrink and subsequently become more sensitive to standard treatments like chemotherapy and radiation. A patient could then receive a smaller, less toxic, and more effective dose of either chemotherapy or radiation.Another project is A Systems Genetics Approach to Individualized Lung Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy
Cancer treatment is proceeding rapidly towards the era of individualized medicine, where decisions regarding treatment are based on the individual molecular characteristics of each patient’s tumor. This will require detailed knowledge of the host genetic background as well as of the somatic genetic events that characterize each patient’s tumor. We also need to find ways to develop combinatorial targeted therapies to eradicate this disease, as no single drug is likely to provide permanent cures.
This ongoing 1.2 million dollar project with Prinicpal Investigator Allan Balmain, PhD, FRSE, funded by the Bonnie Addario Lung Cancer Research Foundation focuses on development of molecular predictors of individual prognosis or response to therapy. The Jablons laboratory has accumulated an invaluable set of tissue samples comprising both normal and tumor samples from hundreds of lung cancer patients, with associated clinical follow up data. Genome wide scans of SNPs in normal DNA from >500 lung cancer patients are being carried out, together with whole genome CGH and gene expression profiling of the gene copy number changes and expression patterns in corresponding tumors from the same patients. In addition, sequencing will be carried out on a panel of genes implicated in lung tumor development or progression to identify activating or inactivating mutations. These different sets of data that encompass both germline and somatic genetic approaches to lung cancer analysis will be used to develop comprehensive genetic networks for prediction of risk.
Novel algorithms have been developed that enable us to construct genetic networks from gene expression and CGH microarray data, and to integrate different types of data to find patterns of predictive molecular biomarkers. Application of this algorithm to these datasets will enable the approach to the ultimate objective of establishing the wiring diagram of the lung cancer cell—the network of genetic variants, and their expression patterns, that influence individual cancer susceptibility, risk of progression, or response to therapy.
By funding programs like these nationwide, BJALCF can help investigate cutting-edge research and implement clinical ideas that promise to save the lives of countless people who suffer from thoracic cancers.
An overall goal of the Foundation is that 100% percent of our fundraising efforts go directly to eradicating lung cancer through research, early detection, education, prevention, and treatment.
Grants from the ABAFTC Foundation are made by invitation only.
Below is a chart of BJALCF grants:
