About CR&T
Fact Sheet | History | Mission
Mission
The mission of the Cancer Research and Treatment Fund is to provide the resources for state of the art research that leads to effective treatments for cancer.
For 40 years, the Cancer Research and Treatment (CR&T) 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. It was the vision and innovative work of CR&T founder, Richard T. Silver, M.D., that the gateway to the cure lay in advancing the treatment of blood malignancies as well as the more common cancers such as those of the prostate, breast, lung and colon.
This reflects the important role that hematological research has played in the development of new therapies. Because blood cancer cannot be excised by surgery, hematologists have had to seek solutions that are 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 specificity never before possible.
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.
It is with this hope and the continuing support of our friends that we look to a future when cancer is only known through history books.
