Tower Cancer Research Foundation’s giving power over the past year is pacing with the remarkable rate of breakthroughs and approvals of innovations in cancer research. In the coming year, Tower will fund seven researchers, as the foundation’s fundraising has grown by nearly fifty percent, significantly increasing our grant giving capacity. This timing is crucial, as the promise of bench science is increasingly paired with machine learning, fueling precision oncology, predictive oncology and the potential of AI – all continuously boosting the rate of discovery.
The work of our grantees in today’s cancer research landscape is most auspicious. We focus both on encouraging early career investigators bringing novel thinking, and mid-career researchers advancing critical work.
Tower Cancer traditionally focuses on researchers here in Southern California, and now the addition of the Dr. Susan Love Fund grant expands eligibility nationwide. Broadening the scope of Tower’s giving creates greater opportunities for connections with investigators around the globe pursuing cutting edge research. In the work to understand and end cancer, giving is imperative. Now It’s also exciting to see the growing range of innovation boosted by federal initiatives, including projects identified by Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a young agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tasked with fast-tracking transformative biomedical research.
One example worth watching is the collaboration of University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers with scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory, leveraging the capacities of supercomputing to use AI approaches to discover new targets for cancer therapies. With JPL and other iconic institutions dedicated to pioneering work in engineering in our backyard, we look forward to similar partnerships in the work to cure cancer.
The opportunities to harness data and bench science continue to expand, and most importantly, will translate into greater rates of detection and survival that will impact millions of people and their families. Innovative research is exciting, sometimes startling, ideally transformational. But most significantly, it can mean more life for people who live with cancer.
The power of research is hope. Scientifically speaking, the success of a clinical trial can have meaning and implications for adjacent research and emerging approaches. But patients and their families often are too busy and burdened with seeking help to fully examine or even understand the science. The focus of patients and their families is life. That is precisely why Tower Cancer chooses to focus on both research and patient care. No compromises.
I’m humbled to note that while recently visiting a loved one in the hospital over several days, it was clear to me that many families there were absorbing the news and the new reality that their loved one had just received a cancer diagnosis. The sorrow could not be muted.
Our work is not done, for the sake of each of those families, and so many others. As we look ahead to a new year, let us celebrate the breakthroughs, and renew the determination to support the imperative work ahead.