Your donations are absolutely critical.  Blood cancers can affect anyone—men, women and children.  An estimated 1,129,813 people in the US are living with, or are in remission from leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma.

  • Every three minutes,someone new is diagnosed.
  • Every ten minutes, someone dies.
  • Leukemia still causes more deaths than any other cancer among children.

While that picture seems awful to think about, it was in recent history a lot worse.

In the 1960’s the survival rates for these rare blood cancers were terrible:

Hodgkin’s Lympoma 40%
Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma 31%
Leukemia 14%
Myleoma 12%

And they weren’t much better for my mother, who we lost to T-Cell Lymphoma over a decade ago.  But over the last decade, promising leaps have been made to develop treatments for cancers like T-Cell Lymphoma.  Lymphomas that were once the most lethal fifty years ago now have promise thanks to the efforts of organizations like LLS, and their investment in blood cancer research.  LLS has invested over $1 billion since 1949 — approximately $74 million in fiscal year 2013 alone. This includes funding for 122 new grants to researchers in academic institutions and $14 million in contracts through the LLS Therapy Acceleration Program.  The results of over five decades of efforts are clear:

Hodgkin’s Lympoma 88%
Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma 71%
Leukemia 59%
Myleoma 45%

Your donations go directly into this program at a rate of 78%.  The LLS Therapy Acceleration Program addresses the bottlenecks that form in the drug development pipeline by:

  • Facilitating partnerships between LLS-funded researchers in academia and commercial service providers who can move promising basic discoveries through development, FDA approval and into clinical trial
  • Partnering with leading clinical trial centers to accelerate testing of new, blood cancer therapies
  • Investing in biotech companies to help them advance potential therapies that would not otherwise have priority, due to the orphan status (small market share) of most blood cancer treatments

Please make sure that you consider a donation today!

2 thoughts on “how your dollars make a difference!

  1. Tracy Manning

    Go Team Fernandez!!!!

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