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.

Dana-Farber is a leader in drug development: In the last 5 years, more than half of all FDA-approved cancer drugs were developed with significant contributions from Dana-Farber investigators. We lead the revolution to transform treatment through precision cancer medicine, analyzing genetic material in patient tumors to pinpoint weaknesses to exploit with targeted drugs. Our programs in cancer chemistry, biology, and imaging give us the unique ability to manufacture and test prototype drugs, spurring a paradigm shift: treatments now routinely aim to match patients with medicines that target vulnerabilities specific to their individual tumors.

Yet, we still don’t have drugs for many targets—some of which are considered “undruggable” because current treatments have no effect. In many cases, tumors become resistant to existing drugs, allowing cancer to return or worsen. We need entirely new drugs that work in unconventional ways to attack new targets common to multiple cancers.

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. We also want to leverage our success in the fast-moving field of targeted protein degradation.

Tens of thousands of proteins in each cell control its workings. Many diseases, including cancer, are due to abnormal or malfunctioning proteins, not genetic mutations. Drugs that block abnormal proteins are standard treatments for cancer, but most proteins can’t be “drugged” using current methods. Targeted protein degradation works differently: rather than block or inhibit a protein, it removes it from the cell by exploiting the cell’s mechanism for eliminating—or degrading—proteins that are misshapen, worn-out, or no longer needed. Our scientists have already built the first tools to hijack that mechanism and turn cancer against itself. But there is much more to do.

Funds from The Dana-Farber Campaign will accelerate efforts to identify and exploit new molecular and genomic targets, “drug the undruggable,” and develop next-generation therapies to overcome treatment resistance, for the benefit of patients everywhere.

For more information or questions, please contact Mark Veligor.

Our expert biostatisticians, computational biologists, and knowledge systems engineers are driving innovation to Defy Cancer by creating and employing tools to leverage patient and genomic data into actionable treatments.

Cancer is a complex set of diseases, with myriad genetic and biological underpinnings, symptoms, drug interactions, and treatment side effects. The revolution in genomic technologies gives scientists the unprecedented ability to mine the cancer genome, as well as the mountain of clinical data we partner with our patients to collect. The ability to curate and analyze this data has a substantial impact on the lives of current patients, while empowering researchers to make discoveries to transform cancer care for future patients.

MatchMiner, an award-winning Dana-Farber innovation, is the world’s first open-source platform for matching patients to clinical trials using genomic and clinical markers—using data science to ensure patients have customized cancer care. We now want to employ machine learning to scan handwritten patient notes and automatically extract crucial data into formats that enable ready analysis.

For example, our teams recently used machine-learning tools to interpret the text of radiology reports from more than 1,000 lung cancer patients. By building a database of outcomes to help “train” the machine-learning software to interpret text, they found that the software could generate outcome descriptions similar to those from radiologists—and dramatically faster. Human curators took about 20 minutes to annotate a single imaging report. In half that time, the computer models could annotate 30,000 imaging reports.

Advanced statistical analyses will filter and translate data into diagnostic assessments and treatment recommendations. Artificial intelligence will help unlock potentially revolutionary insights by identifying patterns not readily apparent to humans. And while we can already pinpoint mutations driving many individual cancers and identify which treatments might help, investments will catalyze clinicians’ ability to act on this information more quickly to save more lives.

For more information or questions, please contact Mark Veligor.