My weekend in Springfield
I thought I was putting NET cancer on the back burner this weekend while I was at the New England American Cancer Society Leadership Summit in Springfield–and to an extent, I did just that. This year’s conference was much better than last year’s. The speakers were better, the sessions were better, and the atmosphere was better. I learned a lot and got re-energized for this year’s Relay for Life campaign.
It is not that we lack ideas…
But NET cancer is never far from the front burner no matter how hard I push it off to one side. And with the news of the Swedish virus still echoing in my mind, I knew there was some networking I needed to do.
Springfield and NET cancer
As it turned out, the networking found me–and found me fairly quickly. A number of people suggested I need to toss the funding needs of the Swedish NET cancer project up the chain of command to Otis Brawley, who is the ACS’ chief medical officer, and the head of research for the ACS to see if we can’t get them interested in helping out. I’ll be doing exactly that later this week.
They have a huge goal…
I’ll also be pushing that issue next month when I meet with the Visiting Committee for Gastrointestinal Cancers at Dana-Farber. Many of the other members of the committee have far deeper pockets than I can ever pretend to–and I hope I can interest some of them in helping put together the funding for that NET cancer virus project.
Relaying Big
Still, the real reason for my trip to Springfield was to start the planning process for the 2013 Relay for Life of Greater Fall River. The national theme this year is “Dream Big, Hope Big, Relay Big” and the national level is certainly trying to do the first two in hopes of bringing about the third.
We are learning enormous amounts…
Last year was disappointing on the national, regional, and local levels for most Relays. Nationally, both in terms of participants and money raised, Relay took a significant step backwards. New England Relays also took a hit in those two areas, though on a significantly smaller scale. Locally, we had more participants on teams and looked on track to meet our financial goals, but then the heat and the rains arrived and stalled that piece of things.
Our loss, however, was New Bedford’s gain as their event garnered enough money to rise to second place in New England.
Stopping the slide
Nationally, ACS wants to see the participation slide stop and go in the opposite direction. The New England program agrees with them and has launched a “Thirteen in 2013 Challenge.” The idea is to average 13 members per team this year–which would be up from the 11 of 2012. There is a contest set up to encourage people to do that.
…the networking found me…
But there is a more important challenge than money or participants. Currently, ACS says the research of the last 50 years is resulting in 300 lives saved from premature death at the hands of cancer per day. They have a huge goal there: they want to make that number 1000 lives saved a day.
Ideas versus resources
Reaching that goal will take a substantial effort on several fronts–but the possibility really is there. We are learning enormous amounts about cancer every day. Last night I saw a story on the “Cancer Atlas,” an attempt to get all the knowledge we have available to doctors and researchers everywhere. We are working on the cancer genome–and once that is thoroughly unravelled we will have new ways of attacking cancer that we did not have before.
NET cancer is never far from the front burner…
It is not that we lack ideas–it is that we lack the resources to exploit those ideas.
To that end, while my personal focus will remain on NET cancer, I will continue to do all I can to increase the resources for all cancers. Whether I like it or not, I continue to be surrounded by cancer–and not all of them are NET cancers.
