Drive the Dream of Hope Golf Outing 2025

[unclear] Our group is a group of oncologists, scientists, nurses and many others who take care of children with rare pediatric solid tumors. I have a particular interest in taking care of children with Wilms tumors, which is the type of cancer that Alessia had. Wilms tumor is the most common kidney cancer that children get. There are about 500 cases a year in children.

And although many patients present like Alessia, three years old, with a belly mass, Alessia was actually very fortunate because she was identified by her pediatrician, who's here, pretty early on. Unfortunately, many children don't present like that. I see a lot of kids where the tumor has spread far away, or who were treated somewhere else and come to us for second opinions. And even for the kids you can cure, usually with a combination of chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, the survivors still have pretty significant long-term side effects.

There are no effective therapies for kids who relapse. No targeted therapies. There's no immunotherapy for Wilms tumors. So there's an urgent need to develop new treatments for kids with Wilms tumors, and that's why events like this are so important.

These funds are now in their third year of supporting my research, as well as the Pediatric Cancer Foundation, which in turn also supports a trial that I'm moving forward. The work we're doing at Sloan Kettering is really heavily focused on moving the needle for children with Wilms tumors. We have two trials for Wilms tumor patients, and in particular there's a phase two trial that we're moving forward with funds from this event, as well as funding from the PCF. That's really exciting. In fact, without those funds, we wouldn't be able to make this a national study. It would just be at our own hospitals.

We're very excited and appreciative of you being here, not only supporting my research and trying to find better therapies for children with Wilms tumors, but also supporting the PCF, which, beyond the work we're doing at Sloan Kettering, supports many other investigators across the country.

I think Paul highlighted that with the recent federal funding cuts, it's even more incumbent on philanthropy to support research in pediatric oncology, because there's even less than we were getting before. So I just want to thank everyone for coming out tonight. There's such a need for these kids, and you coming out and showing support is really impactful. Thank you all for coming and supporting the Fegans, supporting our research and supporting [unclear]. Thank you.

Hi. I am a medical oncologist, but I treat adults, so why am I here today at this event that raises funds for pediatric cancer research?

In my over 30 years of practicing medical oncology, I've seen some really amazing advances in our treatment of cancer. We're now able to use immunotherapy to stimulate a patient's own immune system to attack their cancer and put it into long-term remission. Really exciting stuff: diseases that used to be a death sentence, and patients are now living for many years in remission.

We have also learned how to personalize our medical therapies. We take someone's tumor and study the specific mutations present within their tumor cells, and then we can tailor their treatment to target the mutations that are driving their cancer to grow. This has proven to make not only more effective therapies, but also much less toxic therapies.

Now, all of these newer treatments have first been developed and studied in adults, and it takes time to get them to children. Pediatric cancer is a rare disease. It's not as common as cancer in adults, so it's felt that the need for pediatric cancer treatments is less. But as we all heard here tonight, even just one child with cancer is one child too many. And for every child who is affected by cancer, there's a whole family and a whole community affected by the illness.

As I'm sure you're all very well aware, funding for cancer research has been drastically cut within the past several months. Many clinical trials and labs are now struggling to continue their efforts to find effective therapies for pediatric cancers. Sitting on the Medical Advisory Board for the Pediatric Cancer Foundation, I've seen the number of applications requesting grant funding blossom over the past year.

This is why, now more than ever, it's so important that we support events like this to help the Navis Foundation and the Pediatric Cancer Foundation pursue their mission to support groundbreaking research and clinical trials to help eradicate childhood cancer. So thank you again, everyone, for supporting this amazing organization.