Dr. Benz, President of Dana-Farber, on where PMC money goes
The following is a letter from the President of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to the PMC organization.
I have chosen to share it with you and my sponsors to give you a better idea exactly how the money we raise is spent, and how vitally important it is to their lifesaving mission. And, of course, so you too can receive the thanks you deserve for your support of my ride.
Dear Fellow PMC Members:
First, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you on behalf of so many who work so hard to conquer cancer, and even more people who count on us to do just that, and on behalf of everyone at Dana-Farber and all of the people who depend on us. You, individually and collectively, have been absolutely phenomenal. The financial support that you have provided has enabled groundbreaking research that has saved lives and will ensure that we will be able to save more lives in the future. Of equal importance, is the extraordinary spirit and positivity that you bring to your effort. This is enormously uplifting, motivating, and sustaining to all of us who work on the frontline of trying to conquer cancer. You are right there with us, and that is enormously heartening. I thought it would be a good time to update you about what is going on in the world of cancer research and what your incredible support is doing to allow cancer research to move forward at Dana-Farber despite one of the worst external environments in the history of medical research.
Among the most important things unrestricted funds supports is our ability to recruit and retain the world's most incredible faculty of cancer care givers and researchers. You have met many of them; Nadler, Demetri, Winer, Partridge and more. Nearly all of them are here because we were able to use the unrestricted support that you provided to invest in their recruitment and to support their early work, work at the cutting edge, before it was a "sure enough bet" to be funded by the National Institutes of Health or other agencies. Indeed, these faculty members have become so important and prominent that they are the target of enormously attractive recruitment packages from many other institutes. Because of the PMC's record breaking support last year, I was able to use these funds to support retention programs that kept them here to continue their work. PMC support helps convince them that we can commit the resources they need to make the maximum impact on cancer outcomes on now and in the future at Dana-Farber.
PMC funds support work for ground-breaking, out of the box projects by our investigators in their own research programs; other funds allowed us to invest in key equipment such as state of the art sequencing and imaging facilities. One of the world's first small imager Cyclotrons, a multimillion dollar piece of equipment needed for the imaging capabilities at the frontiers in research, is being used on more mouse models in cancer. It was partly funded by the PMC. To get the remaining funding, we were able to leverage your support to obtain matching funds from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We now have the finest animal imaging facility in the country used to study mouse models of cancer, and we will make it available to collaborators within Harvard, and outside to the biotech and pharmaceutical world.
This past Friday, I had the honor of presenting the Osler Young Investigator Award to Dr. Kimberly Stegmaier, one of our rising faculty stars who was supported in her early work by the funds that you raised. She is now a world class developer of novel agents for the treatment of childhood leukemias and neuroblastoma using innovative genomic technologies that we used PMC funds to support. PMC funds allowed us to purchase equipment and collaborative services both at Dana-Farber and the Broad Institute. This has sustained a unique collaboration between two world-class institutions in the conquest of cancer.
This past spring, Drs. Ken Anderson and Paul Richardson and their collaborators from the Medical School and the pharmaceutical industry received the highly prestigious Warren Alpert Award from Harvard for their work in developing novel therapies at record speed. These have been the driving advances resulting in the tripling of survival time for patients with multiple myeloma. A significant amount of the funds that made this work possible came from PMC teams that have ridden in support of Drs. Anderson and Richardson. Perhaps even more importantly, some of the very earliest work of this group, working before its value was apparent, was supported by unrestricted funds that were generated by the PMC.
These are just a few of many examples that provide tangible proof that you are allowing us to forge ahead in very difficult times. In virtually every one of our disease centers and our departments, there are young investigators whose careers were launched by funds raised by the PMC. In every one of our cores and centers, equipment, expert scientists, computational capabilities, expensive supplies and expert personnel are there because we are able to support them with PMC funds. Every one of our clinics and clinical trials are supported by your funds.
You truly are marching with us on the front lines in the war to conquer cancer. It seems almost impossible to do even more than you are doing. However, if ever there was a time for even more effort and generosity, it is now. The federal government allowed "sequestration" to happen, this has resulted in a cataclysmic cut in the NIH budget. Cancer research is disproportionately affected. In addition, Massachusetts and federal healthcare and payment reform are reducing clinical reimbursements. And, in this time of highly constrained resources, competition from many other worthy causes for traditional forms of philanthropy is more intense than ever. It is only through the PMC that we can hope to remain aggressive and optimistic about making a difference in the lives of patients with cancer and saving even more lives in the future. Thank you as always for the incredible work that you do on our behalf.
Sincerely,
Edward J. Benz, Jr., M.D.