March 2009 - In keeping with our mission to be an advocate for research,  The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Foundation has made a donation of $15,000 to the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute.  ALCMI is a national, virtual lung cancer institute dedicated to accelerating the discovery, development, and delivery of new and more efficient treatment options for lung cancer patients.

Our two organizations, unknown to each other at the time, began our respective missions in November of 2007.  Just as The Joan Gaeta Lung Cancer Foundation was being formed in Atlanta, the seeds of ALCMI were being sown 2,500 miles away in San Francisco. 

It was there that leading physicians, clinicians, scientists, researchers, representatives from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, venture capitalists, international investors, and lung cancer survivors convened at the University of California Mission Bay Conference Center.  They met for one purpose – to answer the following question:

“If money for research and development was not a barrier, and a true collaboration could be achieved, what would you do to reach a cure for lung cancer in the least amount of time and how much would it cost?”

The unanimous answer:

“We need a national lung cancer institute – an honest third-party broker – with a virtual specimen repository connecting existing biobanks and researchers world wide through a unique, real-time IT platform and better means of collaboration.”

The goal of ALCMI is to significantly improve lung cancer patient outcomes and survival.  ALCMI accomplishes this by directly facilitating scientific efforts to better characterize this complex and virtually fatal disease and thus accelerate the development of new, targeted therapies that will lead to treatments tailored to the individual Lung Cancer patient.  To this end, ALCMI will work with its partners and supporters to establish a centralized, high-quality tissue/data bank, with investigators subsequently utilizing the resultant findings in ALCMI clinical trials to screen and enrich for patients who have the best chance to positively respond to the study drugs.

“There has been little to no movement in the survival rate of Lung Cancer in the last half century. Everyone will tell you I’m the ultimate optimist,” says board member Dr. David Jablons of UCSF, “But I really do think that in some finite period in our lifetime, especially now with ALCMI, we will see lung cancer, if not completely eradicated, dramatically changed in its onerousness and its impact on life.”