$250 million loan sought by family to cure pediatric Brain Cancer.
#1 KILLER OF KIDS: Pediatric brain tumors are the #1 cancer killer of children. The treatments for those who survive, devastate their growing bodies, resulting in severe toxicities and permanent disabilities. Only 4% of all NIH funding goes to pediatric cancer research, and of that only a fraction is for brain cancer. The McDowell Family is spearheading an effort to borrow $250 million dollars interest-free from the private sector to help cure this horrible disease. We believe it can be done thanks to recent advances in medicine, and have cherry-picked the team of professionals and therapies most likely to lead to this cure. Monies will be channeled directly from the benefactor(s) to the specific labs and clinicians selected by the McDowell’s team; nor will they be subject to administrative or other non-lab fees such as overhead, legal, or construction projects, etc. at the respective institutions. The McDowell’s bona fides are available upon request.
WHY $250 Million: Because that’s the amount our team leaders estimate it will take. For example one clinical trial with 10-20 patients, can cost millions of dollars. One top clinician on one project (person hours + equipment + reagents, etc.) costs about $100K per year. $250 million will fund 2,500 person years of research to fight and cure pediatric brain cancer (two and a half millennia)! We are shifting the paradigm, gathering the world’s experts together to focus on a single cancer category, in an unprecedented spirit of cooperation and the sharing of data (a pre requisite for obtaining funding); yet respecting that researcher’s IP rights and the years of sacrifice and hard work that has brought their therapy to fruition. $250 million will allow researchers to initiate expensive clinical trials and creative research on a scale never seen in pediatric brain cancer. It will allow them to hire additional lab staff to help investigate and expand on their visions and hypotheses for a cure. It will pay for the most cutting edge medical equipment, and for materials like antibodies, oncolytic viruses, reagents, etc. It will pool assets when possible, so as to not duplicate infrastructure. It will free researchers from the constant writing of grant requests to spend more time in the lab or at the drawing board or meeting with their peers. Many of the doctors on our teams, are significantly far along in their research, and funding of this amount allows them to bring those therapies to clinical trials immediately without the standard funding challenges and grant induced delays.
THE LOAN TERMS: The McDowells wish to borrow $250 million dollars, interest-free, and are prepared to pay it back at $1 million per year, through many generations of McDowells, until paid off. Details pertaining to their ability to do so and loan collateralization will be made available to the appropriate persons. Lastly, the mechanics of the funding allow the donor(s), the person(s) loaning the $250 million, to earn the charitable tax write-offs. This can be explained further by the McDowells CPA.
THE TEAM: Dr. Samuel Cheshier and Dr. Robert Wechsler-Reya, two world renowned biomedical scientists, are helming the team and will vet all specific funding; each will have a designated administrative team to keep a regular channel of communication open between all researchers (clinicians and scientists) as well as other like foundations, helping them to align together in groups to develop novel strategies; while ensuring that overlapping areas of expertise can be leveraged. Time is of the essence for these sick kids, hence the funding protocol will be at once sober but aggressive.
IS A CURE FOR PEDIATRIC BRAIN CANCER POSSIBLE?: Yes. A cure for the multi-faceted disease that is pediatric brain cancer has never been so close, thx to immunotherapy, gene therapy, nanotechnology, and oncolytic virus therapy. Even as recently as five years ago, this was not marque de coque de telephoneschöne handyhüllen the case, but the world of medical science is moving at a tremendous and unprecedented pace. The 40+ researchers or organizations below, most heading their own lab with its own concentration, are among the brightest, most creative, proven professionals in the cancer world. They badly need funding to help push potential cures over the finish line. Imagine a life without pediatric brain cancer, where a malignant brain tumor diagnosis is not a death sentence: soon you won’t have to imagine it. *With the exception of the three for-profit Companies, the other labs are linked with non-profit 501C3 corporations or their equivalent (in the case of foreign, non USA labs).
Thank you. TJ Rider McDowell.
Cutstinger@gmail.com.
PO Box 485, Pebble Beach, CA. 93953.
The following are placed in random order. Detailed descriptions of each therapy and access to each researcher is readily available upon request.
- Medulloblastoma Virtual Trial: a revolutionary approach to clinical research that continuously learns from the experiences of all patients on all treatments all the time. Each patient’s treatment is informed by the collective knowledge and resources of the community to optimize their individual outcome, and these n-of-l experiments are coordinated to maximize information gain over all patients in the system. Cancer Commons-Reinventing-Oncology, Virtual Trial Project Whitepaper.
- Dr. Sam Cheshier Lab: Translational Pediatric Neuro Oncology Center. University of Utah.
- Dr. Rob Wechsler-Reya Lab/Dr Corey Raffel Lab/Dr Sabine Mueller Lab: TNF as primer to enhance immune and viral therapies for medulloblastoma. Sanford Burnham/UCSF.
- Dr Richard Vile Lab: Manipulating Apobec3 to induce tumor markers for onclolytic viral therapy. Mayo Clinic.
- Dr. Sylvain Martel Lab: Nanotechnology; using magnetic fields to drive drug-carrying bacteria deepinto cancerous tumors. Polytechnique Montréal
- Dr. Adam Resnick Lab: Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium.
- Dr. Kathy Warren Lab: Director of pediatric brain tumor research for the NIH / NCI center for cancer research.
- Dr. Rachael Sirianni-Dr. David Sandberg Lab: Nanotechnology. MD Anderson
- Dr. Alex Huang/Dr. John Letterio Lab: TGFbeta and CDK5. Case Western Reserve University.
- Dr. Fueyo/Dr. Gomez-Manzano: DNX-2401 oncolytic virus for recurrent glioblastoma. DNAtrix. *PRIVATE COMPANY
- Dr. Dave Anderson Lab: CMV vaccine VBI-1901. Oncolytic vaccines for brain cancers. VBI Vaccines. *PUBLIC COMPANY
- Dr. Kim Kramer Lab: 8H9 therapy using radioimmunotherapy to attack B7H3 marker in Neuroblastoma and medulloblastoma. M Sloan Kettering.
- Dr. Neal Kassel: Director, Focused Ultra Sound Foundation.
- Tocagen. Toca 511 & Toca FC. Injection followed by oral agent to penetrate the BBB to kill metastatic cancer cells. *PUBLIC COMPANY
- Dr Catherin Wu Lab: NEOVAX Neoantigen vaccine. Dana Farber.
- Dr. Mike Sadelain Lab: CRISPR-engineered CAR-T. M Sloan Kettering.
- Dr Ronald Levy Lab: Activating T cells with OX40 to eliminate cancer metastases. Stanford.
- Dr. James Olson Lab: Creator of Tumor Paint, which illuminates residual tumor during resection, and “Optides,” new class of anti-cancer compounds. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
- Dr. Christine Brown Lab: CAR-T therapy. City of Hope, Los Angeles.
- Dr. Steven Gill Lab: CED program. Convection Enhanced Delivery Therapy. University of Bristol, UK
- Dr. Dean Lee Lab: Natural Killer cell program. Ohio State University.
- Dr. Simone Srendi Lab: PLK4 therapy. Northwestern University.This post is sponsored by our partners Wigs
- Dr. Charles Cobbs Lab: Discovered CMV in Glioblastoma. Pioneering personalized treatments vs GBM. Swedish Neuroscience Institute, Seattle.
- Dr. Duane Mitchell Lab: Dendritic Cell Vaccine, University of Florida.
- Dr. Sidhartha Mitra Lab: Harnessing the innate and adaptive immune systems against brain cancer. University of Colorado, Denver.
- Dr. Linda Liau Lab: DCVax-L Brain cancer vaccine. UCLA
- Dr. Robert Gatenby: “Adaptive Therapy” using existing chemo agents to exploit tumor cells’ evolutionary cycle. Moffit Cancer Center.
- Cancer Commons helps individual patients identify personalized, experimental treatment options, and helps them collectively explore all available options far more efficiently than they can as individuals.
- Charles Keller: Children’s Cancer Therapy Development Institute.
- Dr. Michael Taylor, The Hospital For Sick Kids.
- Dr. William Weiss Lab: stem cell biology, genetics, and developmental therapeutics in glioma. UCSF.
- Dr. Crystal Mackall Lab: Stem Cell and Gene Therapy. Stanford University.
- David Ashley Lab. director of Pediatric Neuro-Oncology for Duke’s Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center (PRTBTC)
- Dr. Gregory K Friedman Lab: HSV G207 (Herpes Virus) to treat brain tumors. University of Alabama.
- Dr. Shawn Hingtgen Lab: Turning skin cells into cancer hunting stem cells vs GBM. University of North Carolina.
- Dr. Khalid Shah Lab: Genetically engineering stem cells to fight brain cancer. Harvard, Dana-Farber.
- Dr. Sheila Singh Lab: Canada Research Chair in Human Cancer Stem Cell Biology. McMaster University
- Dr. Mark M Souweidane Lab: Improving therapeutic approaches for pediatric brain tumors. Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
- Dr. Olena Morozova, Lab: Treehouse Initiative, Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, UCSC.
- Dr. Tannishtha Reya: Professor, Pharmacology and Medicine University of California, San Diego. Targeting the stem cell signals that mediate therapy resistance and relapse.
- Dr. Laurence Zitvogel Lab.
- Dr. Michelle Monje-Deisseroth Lab: Emphasis on brain stem disease. Department of Neurology & Neurological Sciences at Stanford.
- Annual Canceragogo Grant Fair; Modeled upon the brilliant Ian’s Friends WhatIFF Symposium: $1 million awarded to top 5 pediatric brain cancer researchers in a Shark-Tank styled forum.