A new way forward
Anne Broderick wasn’t surprised when she found out she had breast cancer. Her grandmother, aunt, mother, two sisters, and a brother had all had cancer. After a lumpectomy, Anne had partial breast radiation, which at the time was only available at Stanford and a few other centers. It took just five days instead of seven weeks. She also took advantage of Stanford’s Healing Partners program, which paired her with a healing touch professional who helped her to maintain her emotional balance during and after treatment. Supportive services and compassionate caregivers made all the difference to Anne: “It was clear everyone cared about me, and the way I was treated definitely contributed to my healing.”
Transforming Cancer Care offers bold new approaches for treatment, prediction, prevention, and long-term survival. Scalable and replicable around the world and across other diseases, this new model will be achieved through philanthropic investments of $250 million across these four fronts:
We will create a new standard of cancer care and deliver a new treatment model that is comprehensive, multidisciplinary, coordinated, and built around the unique medical, social, and emotional needs of each patient and family. Rigorously built on evidence of which treatment choices will deliver the best outcomes, we expect this model to challenge existing practices in American health care. We also anticipate its adoption by centers around the world and across other diseases requiring complex, multidisciplinary care.
We will fight the toughest cancers by targeting those that have proven stubbornly resistant to treatment. We’ll change the prognosis for patients with these cancers by assembling the world’s most sought-after experts, fully funding their work, and creating the investigative community most capable of delivering new hope.
We will capture the power of Stanford science by fully leveraging Stanford’s distinctive strengths in genomics, immunotherapy, bioinformatics, and stem cell medicine. We will work across scientific disciplines and beyond our walls, translating the latest breakthroughs at Stanford and elsewhere into unprecedented abilities to detect, treat, predict, and prevent cancer.
We will seize the innovations of our age by supporting the most creative ideas from the best scientific minds, fueling breakthroughs in cancer science. We will empower those scientists whose high potential and untested ideas hold the greatest promise, but are less likely to attract funding from traditional sources.