Revolutionary Science

When Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was founded in 1947, cancer in children was almost always a death sentence. Today, thanks to the determination of Sidney Farber, MD, and those who followed, the cure rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood leukemia, is nearly 90 percent.

Today, our pediatric patients receive world-class care in our Jimmy Fund Clinic, and have access to hundreds of clinical trials representing the most cutting-edge treatments. We consistently rank #1 or #2 among pediatric cancer centers in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report.

Yet, pediatric cancers of all types are still the leading cause of disease-related death in children in the U.S. We are still a long way from our ultimate goal: a world where children always survive a cancer diagnosis.

Gifts to The Dana-Farber Campaign will accelerate efforts in our laboratories to find new prevention and treatment measures, reduce treatment side effects, and stop every childhood cancer in its tracks. Gifts will fund pioneering work to better understand even the rarest pediatric cancers and develop new drugs, including immune-based therapies and precision medicine approaches.

For more information or questions, please contact Kelsey Cunningham.

At Dana-Farber, we aim to provide precise and effective treatments to every patient that walks through our doors.

Donor support has helped us transform cancer treatment through seminal discoveries in cancer genomics—a field dedicated to identifying the genetic alterations that cause cancer. Our physician-scientists used genomics knowledge to help launch the era of precision cancer medicine, allowing us to match patients with medicines that target the specific genetic alterations driving their tumors.

Despite this life-changing progress, we have more work to do to realize the full potential of precision medicine for all patients. In recent years we have only scratched the surface in our understanding of the DNA in cancer tumors. Determined to move beyond the 1 percent of the cancer genome that we currently understand, we aim to decode the remaining 99 percent—the “dark matter” of the cancer genome, in which Dana-Farber scientists discovered the first cancer-related mutations nearly a decade ago.

Support through The Dana-Farber Campaign will expedite our efforts to identify and understand the function of all genes, identify new therapeutic targets, conduct clinical trials of experimental therapies across cancer types, employ next-generation genomic testing, and help deliver precision medicine to all patients.

By increasing our understanding, we can speed development of new testing to rapidly identify and target specific mutations, devise new drugs to attack the weaknesses that information uncovers, and train a new generation of scientists to transform cancer care by matching the right drugs with the right patients from the very start.

For more information or questions, please contact Patty Brent.

Many of today’s most important advances in cancer care trace their origins to basic science—research that uncovers biology’s fundamental principles. Research by Dana-Farber's William G. Kaelin Jr., MD, for example, revealed how cells sense and respond to oxygen. That basic research led to new medicine for kidney cancer, and could do the same for cardiovascular disease, macular degeneration, and anemia.

The generous support of more than 700 donors over the years helped to fund Dr. Kaelin’s pursuit of innovative ideas that led to this breakthrough. This is but one example of how gifts to Dana-Farber have financed breakthroughs in the lab that speed to the bedside as new treatments for many types of cancer.

Another example is the work of Dana-Farber’s Gordon Freeman, PhD, to unravel the workings of PD-1, a protein that was known to help cancer cells evade the immune system. Two decades ago, Freeman and his colleagues discovered a pair of partner molecules, PD-L1 and PD-L2, that work with PD-1 to protect normal cells from being mistakenly attacked by immune cells. Cancer exploits this interaction to switch off the body’s anti-tumor response. This finding opened up a whole new field of immunotherapy research and resulted in FDA approvals of PD-1 therapies for several cancers.

Dana-Farber is at the forefront of curiosity-driven science that ultimately translates lab discoveries into medicines. For example, several years ago, Dana-Farber’s Pasi Jänne, MD, PhD, set out to develop a new targeted therapy for patients with a drug-resistant form of lung cancer. Working with Dana-Farber colleague and structural biologist, Michael Eck, PhD, he generated a detailed structural map of the protein he wanted to target, and in collaboration with Dana-Farber chemists, designed a molecule that could bind to and inhibit the target protein. Thanks to the many cross-disciplinary collaborations that occur regularly at Dana-Farber, the project went from concept to preclinical testing in fewer than six months, setting the stage for clinical trials of drugs similar to this compound.

Supporting The Dana-Farber Campaign will foster this constant flow of ideas among our experts, enabling us to pursue ideas that could be the next home run in cancer care.

For more information or questions, please contact Mark Veligor.