Vision:

For 35 years, the Cancer Research and Treatment Fund has been a continuing source of financial support for clinical cancer research at one of the world's great medical centers, New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center. Through its support of physician-scientists in the center's Division of Hematology-Oncology, the Fund has helped advance the treatment not only of blood malignancies but of more common cancers such as those of the breast, lung, and colon. This reflects the seminal role hematology research has played in the development of new cancer therapies across the board.

What accounts for this seminal role? It begins with the fact that in times past when the treatment of cancer was dominated by surgery, blood malignancies were the prime exception. Confronting cancers that did not lend themselves to surgery, hematologists had to seek solutions that were principally biological and pharmacological.

And it is precisely this approach, combining biology and pharmacology, which today seems to offer the greatest promise for advances against all varieties of cancer. Decades of massive federal and private investments in biomedical research have laid the basis for a new generation of drugs that attack cancer at the molecular level, targeting cancer cells with a specificity never before possible.

A perfect illustration was the successful experimental trial, under the auspices of Novartis, of the new anti-leukemia drug, called Gleevec, conducted at Weill Cornell and at sites around the world. Dr. Richard Silver, CR&T's medical director and the principal investigator in the New York phase of the initial trials and currently head of the team in new global trials on other forms of cancer, views Gleevec as the most promising anti-leukemia drug he has seen in his career. This trial has been viewed by the research community as a model for testing new agents against more common cancers.

Today in laboratories across the country, scores, even hundreds, of molecule-targeting agents are in development for potential use as anti-cancer therapies. The great challenge ahead will be to bridge the gap between laboratory and clinic, so that promising agents reach the people who need them as quickly, safely, and painlessly as possible.

Here is where an organization like CR&T can be an especially valuable resource. CR&T has no bureaucracy, no layers of redundant personnel and no endless committees. It moves swiftly and decisively in the direction which long experience tells it will lead to the best payoffs in terms of patient care.

CR&T's independence and small size are key to its continued success. With no time or money to waste, it must work harder, smarter and faster to earn the continued loyalty of friends and benefactors who believe in its winning combination of research and care-giving.