Three leading health organizations—the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research, and the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group—have joined forces to find a cure for blood cancer.
Each organization contributed $1.5 million to the LLS Blood Cancer Discoveries Grants Program, a newly established fund dedicated to advancing the medical community’s understanding of these diseases. Over the next three years, the program will award up to six grants of $750,000 to projects focused on blood cancer research.
“These grants represent a significant investment in cancer discovery research that has a clear line of sight to better outcomes for patients,” said Michele Cleary, CEO of the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research. “In collaboration with our partners at LLS and the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, the Mark Foundation is pleased to help address the critical need for this type of funding, and we look forward to seeing the results of the science it will support.”
Experts estimate that 176,200 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with leukemia, lymphoma, or myeloma in 2019. That equates to roughly one person every three minutes. The number of deaths caused by these diseases is expected to be 56,770 in 2019 alone.
“LLS’s investment in research over the past fifteen years is translating into remarkable improvements in outcomes for blood cancer patients,” said Lee Greenberger, chief scientific officer at LLS. “Over the past two and a half years alone, we’ve seen the FDA approve 48 therapies in the blood cancers, and LLS’s investment in research played a role in 42 of these. However, cures still remain elusive for many aggressive blood cancers. This new program, made possible through this collaboration, seeks to ignite that next wave of discoveries and fill the pipeline that eventually will become the translational research of the next five to 10 years.”