Funding Approach

One of our Foundation’s goals is to develop, execute, and monitor a strategic, highly responsive grant program that will move quickly to eradicate lung cancer through screening, research, education, prevention and treatment. The Foundation will make grants to support these mutli-disciplinary areas.

Screening and Prevention
A major focus of the Foundation’s support goal is for the Screensavers Initiative. This initiative is the first focused approach to early detection and screening in the country.

Since the National Cancer Act was passed to change the survival rate for all cancers 35 years ago, breast cancer reached a survival rate of 85%. Prostate cancer: 99%. Lung cancer, the deadliest of all cancers, was inexplicably left behind…with an overall survival rate of 15%. Our project will expedite progress in survival rates through early detection and screening. Technology for lung cancer detection exists in the same way breast cancer had the mammogram…prostate cancer…the PSA…the spiral CT scan exists for lung cancer…but it remains out of reach for most.

Why? Because the existing protocols for lung cancer screening exclude the 60% of all lung cancer diagnoses last year of nonsmokers and those who had quit smoking. Right now, an individual must be over age 50 with at least a 20-pack-year history of smoking. This protocol also excludes all the neversmokers who are being diagnosed from ages 27-50. It is an unequivocal untruth that a person cannot get lung cancer unless they smoked. If you breathe, you can get lung cancer.

The Screensavers Initiative will dispel existing myths, raise awareness, and save lives immediately by expanding protocols to include not only heavy smokers, but occasional smokers, those who have been around second-hand smoke, neversmokers and anyone concerned with the possibility of getting lung cancer, and we intend to start this project in 10-12 hospitals in major cities nationwide.

Research and Treatment
Among others, the Foundation supports the research of Dr. David Jablons, co-founder of ABAFTC and Program Director and Ada Endowed Chair for Thoracic Oncology at UCSF. One example of a cutting-edge research project Jablons and his team are studying is a genetic pathway called Wnt, which has proven to be critical in tumor growth. In normal cell development, the Wnt passage is active during the cell�s early stages�when it is dividing and growing�and becomes inactive once the cell reaches maturity. In malignant mesothelioma cells, however, the pathway is abnormally activated after the cell has matured. Funds can be used to identify effective means of disabling the Wnt pathway in these tumor cells. By shutting down the pathway, it is suspected that tumors will shrink and subsequently become more sensitive to standard treatments like chemotherapy and radiation. A patient could then receive a smaller, less toxic, and more effective dose of either chemotherapy or radiation.

By funding programs like these nationwide, ABAFTC can help investigate cutting-edge research and implement clinical ideas that promise to save the lives of countless people who suffer from thoracic cancers.

An overall goal of the Foundation is that 90 percent of our fundraising efforts go directly to eradicating lung cancer through research, early detection, education, prevention, and treatment.

Grants from the ABAFTC Foundation are made by invitation only.

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