Stand Up To Cancer Day

What the day is

Stand Up To Cancer is a fundraising initiative founded in 2008 by a group of women working in film and media, several of whom had lost family to cancer or been treated for it themselves. It is marked here on September 11, and is best known for televised fundraising events carried simultaneously across competing networks.

Origin and background

The distinctive part is not the fundraising but what the money is designed to change. Cancer research has traditionally been funded by grants to individual investigators at single institutions, which works but has known costs: laboratories studying the same problem compete rather than share, results are held back until publication, and moving a finding from the laboratory toward a patient can take many years.

The response was to fund collaborative teams instead. Grants go to groups drawn from several institutions, working on one defined problem with agreed milestones and a requirement to share data, and the awards are administered with a scientific partner organization that runs the peer review. The explicit aim is to shorten the distance between a laboratory result and a treatment a patient can actually receive.

The wider picture is genuinely encouraging and should be stated precisely. Cancer death rates in the United States have fallen substantially since their peak in the early 1990s, a decline usually attributed to reduced smoking, earlier detection through screening, and better treatment. That progress is real and it is uneven. Survival for some cancers has improved dramatically while for others, pancreatic cancer among them, it remains poor, and averages conceal both facts.

Clinical trials are the mechanism by which any of this advances, and enrollment is a persistent bottleneck.

How to take part

• Take up the screening you are eligible for. Early detection does the most work.
• Know your family history and tell your doctor about it.
• Donate if you can, or support a local cancer charity directly.
• Ask about clinical trials if you or someone close is in treatment.
• Offer practical help to someone in treatment: lifts, meals, paperwork.