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Franklin Templeton Shootout 5K
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Charity

Who Is CureSearch?

CureSearch for Children's Cancer is a national non-profit foundation that accelerates the cure for children's cancer by driving innovation, eliminating research barriers, and solving the field's most challenging problems. CureSearch fights every day to make treatment possible and a cure probable for the 43 children diagnosed with cancer daily. This is done in three ways:

  • Accelerating the cure for children at the greatest risk of losing their battle with cancer by posing essential challenges to scientists and inviting teams to overcome them with novel research approaches.
  • Supporting children's enrollment in clinical trials that have the potential to save their lives today.
  • Providing resources and education, so that no child faces a cancer diagnosis without a fully equipped support team behind them.

Ultimately, CureSearch is working to change the odds for those children most at risk. In the last 40 years, the overall survival rate for children's cancer has increased from 10% to 78%. Still, for many types of children's cancer, the survival rate is much less. Consider the following:

  • Every day, 36 children are diagnosed with cancer.
  • Children's cancer affects all ethnic, gender, and socio-economic groups.
  • The average age of children diagnosed is six.
  • More than 40,000 children undergo treatment for cancer each.
Scientific Funding

The 2013 Acceleration Initiative will make up 50% of CureSearch's funding and will support three "grand challenges" that currently create barriers to advancing cures for children.

  • Understand why cancer spreads and how to develop medications to prevent it from doing so.
    • Children whose cancer has spread (metastasized) have significantly poorer outcomes than those whose cancer is located in only one place. Unfortunately, researchers understand very little about what happens in the body that causes cancer to move from place to place.
  • Support researchers trying to understand how cells are able to become drug-resistant so that new medications preventing this from occurring can be given to children.
    • Cancer cells are very adaptable. Often times, this means that some cancer cells are killed by chemotherapy while others change in order to survive such medications. When this happens in children with cancer, the chances of surviving cancer decrease significantly.
  • Address roadblocks in research to increase the speed at which drugs move from the laboratory to the patient.
    • The path from making a discovery in the laboratory to creating a new treatment can be extremely long and many roadblocks can be encountered.

Because clinical trials can save children's lives today and help accelerate the delivery of new therapies to children, CureSearch will continue to support local hospitals with Clinical Trial Advancement Awards, providing 20% of revenue to these trials in 2013.

Educational Resources

CureSearch continues to provide education and resources so that no child faces a diagnosis and treatment without a fully equipped team behind them. This year, CureSearch will:

  • Develop videos and procedures and treatments suitable for parents and children.
  • Host a series of webinars for parents and the psych-social aspects of caring for a child with cancer including creating a caring group, school issues, and processing feeling and understanding behaviors of all family members.
  • Host a series of webinars providing Child Life Specialists with education about palliative care and pain management, end of life issues, and working with the adolescent and young adult population.

CureSearch.org is an online resource for patients, their families, and support systems. The website provides up-to-date information about the various types of children's cancer along with research trials, definitions and descriptions of tests, procedures and treatments and information to help families manage the emotional aspects of caring for a child with cancer.

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