The Latest Medicine
We support efforts to develop new drugs that shut off the switches in cancer-causing cells, and research new ways to strengthen our own immune systems to search and destroy cancer cells.
Efforts We Support
Contributions
The Eileen Fund contributions benefit the John Theurer Cancer Center’s Research Division at Hackensack University Medical Center. In addition to cancer research, fundraising will also help fund Parkinson’s disease research and heart research. Your donation will help to save lives today, tomorrow, and in the future.
Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy has changed the paradigm of traditional cancer care offering hope for better outcomes, including more cures, but is significantly less toxic than traditional therapy.
Genomics identifies dangerous changes in DNA. Proteomics identifies the abnormal proteins that change our own cells from friend to foe. Precision medicine attempts to eradicate every affected cancer cell, without causing additional changes in DNA that can cause new cancers to develop. Not everyone responds to drugs or treatments in the same way and diseases react differently in each individual, but thanks to precision medicine, healthcare providers are increasingly able to treat patients with a much higher degree of accuracy.
Going Deeper – Research Focus – by Dr. Andrew Pecora
The era of precision medicine is here and its promise to change clinical outcomes for patients with advanced cancers is just beginning. The Eileen Fund was created to advance the promise of better outcomes through iterative investigation to go after and defeat cancer at its core, aberrant molecular pathway activation leading to unregulated cell growth capable of taking a life.
Every hour trillions of our cells are following a metabolic pathway designed to sustain life and in doing so billions of cells replicate and create and maintain healthy tissues, the fabric of our lives. In this process, nature built in protections for cells going through divisions to undergo programmed cell death (apoptosis) if unwanted changes occurred to that cell’s DNA or RNA, that could lead it to become a precancerous cell.
Unfortunately for some, the natural protective mechanisms that take out pre-cancerous cells are overcome, and a cancerous phenotype evolves and when established it rapidly replicate millions of times over eventually leading to a detectable mass (tumor) that if untreated takes the life of the individual.