Revolutionary Science

We seek to create a new discipline that will forever change the impact of cancer. Support through The Dana-Farber Campaign will allow us to re-imagine cancer care and stop cancer before it starts through cancer prevention, early detection, and interception. In so doing, Dana-Farber will become the preeminent institution for early detection and interception. 

Dana-Farber has been a leader in cancer prevention and early detection for decades. Our scientists have made groundbreaking discoveries about inherited syndromes that changed the standard of care. We are leading the discovery of precursor conditions associated with cancer development, and we are now able to assess risk, detect cancers earlier, and apply interventions better than ever before.

But we have a long way to go. We want to transform cancer care and reach millions of at-risk people, changing their lives through improved screening, early detection, and intercepting disease before it develops or advances.

Gifts to The Dana-Farber Campaign will allow us to:

• Create a fully integrated clinical and research program that defines the field of early cancer detection and interception 
• Unify and build on Dana-Farber’s world-leading work in early detection, prevention, and interception
• Develop personalized screening and prevention plans based on an individual’s genomic profile and lifestyle factors.
• Identify substantial new cohorts of at-risk individuals and creating new precision intervention strategies for them
• Detect new and recurring cancers at their earliest stages through novel technologies

Together, we can change cancer care from reactive to proactive and change lives around the world.

For more information or questions, please contact Kate Hall.

Dana-Farber is a global leader in drug discovery, playing a critical role in the development of more than half of all cancer drugs approved by the FDA in the past 5 years. Our pioneering programs in cancer chemical biology and cancer biology give us the unique ability to discover and test prototype drugs and match patients with medicines that target vulnerabilities specific to their individual tumors. The development of these targeted therapies is one of the most important advances in cancer care over the past 20 years.

Yet many cancer-causing proteins are not susceptible to drugs designed in the usual way. Modern targeted cancer drugs are small organic compounds that bind to a faulty protein and mess up how it works. In these cases, the proteins they target have crevices for the drug to fit in, like a key in a lock. Proteins that have these accessible “key” holes in them are considered “druggable,” because drugs can often be made to stop their destructive behavior. However, many of the most important proteins involved in cancer — proteins that drive some of the most common cancers — don’t have this preferred “keyhole” structure, so they’ve been labeled as “undruggable” by pharmaceutical companies.

But we don’t accept that. More than 75 years ago, our founder, Dr. Sidney Farber, said that he “never accepted the incurability of cancer,” and today, Dana-Farber doesn’t accept that cancer-causing proteins are truly undruggable. Dana-Farber is well positioned to continue our leading-edge discovery and address these so-called “undruggable” targets for our patients, to ultimately defy and defeat cancer. 

Now, more than ever, we need the life-changing partnership of our donor community to help us develop powerful new drugs, faster than ever before. Our goal is to raise $130M, which will help us develop 3 to 5 new drug candidates each year—offering hope to adults and children with rare and difficult-to-treat cancers. Together, we can develop next-generation cancer drugs that save lives.

If we don’t do this, it’s likely nobody else will.

For more information or questions, please contact Mark Veligor.

Epigenetics refers to changes in how genetic material is read and processed by the cell, rather than changes to the DNA itself. Like mutations in genes, epigenetic changes can also cause cancer.

For decades, cancer research has focused on the role of genetic mutations, or changes in the DNA sequence, in driving cancer. But DNA is only part of the story.

We now know epigenetic changes can be reversed, opening the door to a new class of cancer-fighting drugs.

With our dual focus on adult and pediatric cancer research, Dana-Farber is leading the epigenetics revolution, translating findings from genetically simpler pediatric cancer studies to more complex adult cancers.

Our researchers’ basic science discoveries in pediatric sarcomas in the early 2000's, for example, played a leading role in the recent FDA approval of the first-ever epigenetic drug to treat solid tumors.

We discovered that the pediatric cancer mixed lineage leukemia (MLL) is driven by an abnormality that leads to widespread epigenetic changes that spur the cancer’s growth. Working with collaborators in biotech, we discovered that a drug can block these changes and halt cancer growth. That drug is now in clinical trials.

Gifts will empower us to create an “epigenetics tool box” of compounds, animal models, and computational approaches for studying epigenetic mechanisms more rapidly and effectively. They will empower us to lead major collaborative research efforts with academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and biotech firms to translate discoveries into clinical trials of epigenetic drugs, either alone or in combination with other therapies.

For more information or questions, please contact Kelsey Cunningham.