Supporting Brain Tumor Research at
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

Dr. David Reardon, MD

Clinical Director, Center for Neuro-Oncology

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

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Dear Friends,

First of all, I wish to thank all of you for being a part of this event and honoring Tim Beach and his family. I would like to share a few words as we gather to honor Tim’s legacy.

This is an exciting time in cancer research. Over the past few years a whole new modality of treating cancer has emerged – immunotherapy. Immunotherapy refers to cancer treatments that help the immune system, our body’s natural defense system to fight cancer. In these past few years, over 10 new immunotherapy drugs have been approved by the FDA for over 16 types of cancer. This is a remarkable achievement, but the reality is that we have only begun to scratch the surface. Even for these cancers that have received FDA approvals, immunotherapy drugs only benefit a minority of patients, and there are some cancers, such as brain cancer, where immunotherapy drugs so far have not had an impact.

Brain cancer is one of the most complex and challenging of cancers, thus it is not too surprising that our initial attempts to tap into the potential of the immune system to fight brain tumors have not been successful. We are learning from ongoing research that brain cancers have in place many adaptations to protect themselves from the immune system.  The more we learn about these adaptations, the better position we achieve to overcome these adaptations and allow the immune system to successfully fight and defeat these devastating tumors.
 

We have a long road ahead and many tough challenges to overcome. Funds raised through events such as the HOPE…It’s a Beach Thing 5K are particularly critical to our brain cancer research efforts. Today, federal funding is severely limited and without funds raised through these types of events, many promising cancer treatment advances would not be able to be pursued.

 

Support from these events adds up and will be vital as we endeavor to bring exciting new treatment approaches forward from our immunotherapy laboratory directly to our brain tumor patients in the clinic.

Finally, please realize that progress and discoveries we make through our research for brain cancer patients with this support frequently “ripple out” and contribute to research efforts ongoing for other types of cancer; thus your support today will help us to impact the outcome for patients with brain cancer as well as many other types of cancer today and for future generations.

On behalf of our patients, their families and our team at the Dana-Farber Center for Neuro-Oncology, thank you for this wonderful event and support today. No doubt, Tim is quite pleased to see this remarkable effort, in his honor, on behalf of others. We will not quit until we find a way to defeat these devastating tumors.

Dave

September 7, 2018