Stand Up To Cancer

At Stand Up To Cancer, our team is energized by the privilege of being part of an initiative that holds such promise to benefit patients who suffer from cancer, and by the potential for SU2C to create real and much needed change in the arena of cancer research and treatment.

Two weekends ago in Washington, D.C., an SU2C delegation of co-founders and staff had the honor of attending the American Association for Cancer Research's 101st Annual Meeting. The AACR is SU2C's official scientific partner and helps SU2C with all components of our model - from assembling the Scientific Advisory Committee and making recommendations about Management Committee members, to communication with the scientists and their various institutions throughout the country, administration of all the grants, and much more.

The five SU2C Dream Teams and 10 of the thirteen Innovative Research Grant Recipients were present for this year's AACR meeting, and participated in the filming of small group interviews to help us share the state of their projects with you.

The excitement of every researcher who participates in Stand Up To Cancer was palpable. Your donations enable researchers and clinicians, senior scientists and junior investigators to come together and collaborate in new and more efficient ways that no prior mechanism had provided them.

Nobel Laureate and SU2C Scientific Advisory Committee Chairperson Dr. Phillip Sharp and many of his colleagues concurred that "we are in a golden moment in cancer research." Scientists understand more about the genes and proteins that drive cancer, and can increasingly identify specific molecular targets for new cancer drugs. The future of cancer treatment will be an unrelenting quest to develop more tolerable, less toxic therapies to treat the very specific errors that instigate cancer's cellular misbehaviors. The Stand Up To Cancer model empowers scientists to bring those therapies to patients in an accelerated time frame.

We want to extend a huge thanks to everyone who responded to the call for questions and submitted their inquiries to scientists_questions@standup2cancer.org. Our discussion with the SU2C scientists combined questions from our community with questions that SU2C staff cultivated in preparation for the meeting and refined over the course of the sessions.

One question from the scientist_questions inbox came from community member Richard. Paraphrased, Richard asked why Stand Up To Cancer appeared to have become a "celebrity-driven" campaign for donations. Richard's wife suffers from leiomyosarcoma, a sarcoma of the soft muscle tissue; she has been in clinical trials for more than six years.

We carried Richard's question to SU2C leadership and scientists. To address the topic of "celebrity": Each time someone joins the SU2C movement, they have a personal connection to cancer. Cancer doesn't care if a person is well known or not; we are all impacted by cancer. Celebrities have a unique ability to reach large and varying audiences--when a well known person is willing to lend his or her support to an effort such as this one, the organization's ability to reach a large number of people is that much greater. Every member of the SU2C movement is a valuable part of this effort: a donor who gives a dollar, a celebrity who lends his or her image or name to the effort, a patient, a researcher, someone who sends a Tweet. Each effort helps-- after all, it's Up2 all of us.

Glad to have Richard's question in hand, we learned that many of the projects in the realm of the SU2C Dream Team's work could impact his wife's cancer type. In fact, Dr. Craig Thompson of SU2C's "Cutting Off the Fuel Supply: A New Approach to the Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer" Dream Team reported that he expected tissue samples in his lab this week that would yield insight into leiomyosarcoma. In fact, most of the Dream Team projects have the potential for broad impact beyond the specific cancer types actually being studied.

We asked several of the doctors what early signals they would look for to indicate whether the SU2C model could be a success. We were thrilled to hear them tell us that those signs are already present. The collaborative model brings scientists from different institutions together, and the simple virtue of removing the barriers to communication for these professionals facilitates their process of discovery.

Dr. Cynthia Zahnow, a basic researcher on SU2C's "Bringing Epigenetic Therapy to the Forefront of Cancer Management" Dream Team, is fighting breast cancer herself. Cindy shared with us that prior to Stand Up To Cancer, she spent a significant amount of her time writing grant proposals, and has to raise money through grants or philanthropic funds to keep her lab going. Because of SU2C--because of you!--Cindy is now able to devote more of her time contributing to research and the work of the Epigenetics Dream Team.

As Dr. Stephen Baylin, leader of the SU2C Epigenetics Dream Team put it, "Collective science is not a new endeavor, but the Stand Up To Cancer model rolls collaborative techniques into a single mission, with an accelerated model--and a mandate for three years to impact. Within a three-year period, with novel use of existing drugs, and by identifying new targets, we can bring epigenetic therapies to the forefront of management for breast, colon and lung cancers. Success will provide a new paradigm for avenues toward treatments of many, if not all, cancers."

We asked Dr. Sharp what he had learned, personally, since he first began to participate in SU2C. His reply was profound: "I realized that I should have known this. We should have tried this sooner." The SU2C Dream Teams and Innovative Research Grant recipients are honored by your support, and they are working furiously and fast, responding to an urgent need with what SAC Vice-Chairperson Dr. Arnold Levine described as a sense of "appropriate impatience."

From basic scientists, researchers, clinicians, informatics and lab technicians to patients, advocates, individual donors, families and friends - thank you to everyone who has joined the Stand Up experiment. You each have helped to launch this endeavor. We have liftoff.

--Bedonna - SU2C production and digital teams