2009 Priority Programs

Several programs are selected as priorities for funding each year by a team led by M. D. Anderson President, John Mendelsohn, M.D. Your donation to one of the essential mission areas — research, prevention, education and capital improvement — will help to fund one of these priority programs. You may also designate a gift to a specific program, a research project or a fundraising event.

Annual Fund

• The Annual Fund is a valuable source of unrestricted support that impacts every aspect of our mission by enabling the institution to respond more rapidly to new ideas and new leads in the battle against cancer.
• Unrestricted philanthropic support plays an especially important role in providing seed funding for biomedical research. A gift to the Annual Fund could enable our physicians and scientists to gather the preliminary data needed to compete successfully for peer-reviewed grants.
• Gifts to the Annual Fund support a broad range of M. D. Anderson programs including research, equipment purchases, continuing education for faculty, public education through outreach, and patient care.

Read more about the Annual Fund

 Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

• Biology is being transformed from a purely lab-based science to an information science. As biomedical research becomes more complex and the use of high-throughput technology for molecular profiling generates more data, bioinformatics, statistics and other information sciences are playing larger and larger roles in analyzing data and increasing our biological understanding of cancer and other diseases.
• Bioinformatic analysis is key to personalization of cancer management, including selection of the best therapy. Use of cutting-edge analysis tools has now provided a large list of possible biomarkers for cancer risk assessment, screening, diagnosis, prognosis and selection and monitoring of therapy. Bioinformatics and computational biology provide better characterization of tumors at the molecular level, and help identify new types of abnormalities to be targeted.
• M. D. Anderson’s bioinformatics team under John Weinstein, M.D., Ph.D., provides support to many departments dedicated to developing personalized treatment based on the biology of a patient’s tumor. This is an enormous challenge because only a handful of researchers today have sufficient expertise in both computer science and the life sciences. There is an urgent need for training more skilled people who can tackle analyzing and interpreting the enormous amounts of critical data being generated to increase our biological understanding of cancer and translate this to therapeutic progress.

MINTOS (Minimally Invasive and New Technology in Oncologic Surgery)

• Minimally invasive surgery involves making small incisions in the skin and inserting long, thin instruments into these incisions to reach inside the patient’s body. These smaller incisions translate into less pain, less pain medication and shorter hospital stays.
• M. D. Anderson physicians use a number of minimally invasive techniques and procedures including: laparoscopy, laser microsurgery, video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery, da Vinci (robotic assisted) Surgical System® and endoscopic skull-based surgery.
• MINTOS increases the quality and safety of clinical care and enhances productivity and efficiency in an effort to reduce the undesired effects of cancer treatment while maintaining or improving treatment outcomes for patients—helping them not only to survive, but also to flourish.
• MINTOS will help facilitate the research endeavors of its members and encourage collaborative research efforts among many M. D. Anderson departments, partially through a systematic training program in new minimally invasive procedures available to residents, fellows, trainees and the surgical faculty.

Read more about Minimally Invasive Surgery (MINTOS)

Pain Research and Treatment

• An estimated half of all cancer patients experience moderate to severe pain related to their disease or to its treatment. However, this condition—which significantly impacts the quality of life for cancer patients and survivors—is under-researched and often under-treated.
• Researchers and clinicians need a better understanding of the complex mechanisms involved in pain to make a difference for patients. But they are limited by a lack of funding as traditional sources of support generally focus on projects related to cancer causes and prevention.
• Gifts to this program (the only dedicated pain research program in the Texas Medical Center) will be used to provide salary support, laboratory equipment and supplies; to expand research and clinical fellowship programs; and to establish a new Center of Excellence in Pain Research and Treatment that will advance the program’s objectives in research and patient care: identifying the cellular and molecular mechanisms of pain and developing novel pain killers.

Pediatrics

• The Children’s Cancer Hospital at M. D. Anderson is one of only a few hospitals dedicated solely to research and treatment of pediatric cancers, which claim the lives of more U.S. children than any other disease. Housing one of the nation’s largest multidisciplinary pediatric cancer programs, it sees more types of the disease than any other children’s hospital in Texas.
• Receiving care at America’s No. 1 cancer center has distinct advantages for pediatric patients. They benefit significantly from M. D. Anderson investments in proton therapy, BrainSUITE® technology, molecular diagnostics and other advances that are often unavailable at other children’s hospitals. And while clinical trials target adults and adult cancers almost exclusively, M. D. Anderson’s leadership in this area enables us to continually examine new molecular drugs approved for adults and determine their suitability for children. Our young patients may thus benefit from new drugs before they are available anywhere else.
• Our pediatrics faculty have developed six anticancer or supportive care agents for children with cancer in recent years, and the promise is great for additional new therapies. More than a dozen molecular targets for specific cancers are being explored. Innovative treatment approaches range from reprogramming T cells from a patient’s own immune system to destroy cancer cells, to aerosol delivery of novel drugs to fight tumors that spread to the lungs.

Survivorship

• There will be 18 million cancer survivors by 2020. With 65 percent having lived past the five-year mark and having returned to their primary care physician, they will still need specific cancer observation, testing and care.
• Challenges for survivors include fatigue, pain, lymphedema, oral problems, weight loss, bladder and sexual issues as well as insurability, employment and financial concerns.
• M. D. Anderson is unifying current and future research and programs that will benefit survivors and will stimulate research efforts across disciplines through research grants, data-sharing and expanded core resources.
• One of the first projects is the Health Passport—Summary of Cancer Treatment, an updateable electronic medical record for patients that will be used throughout their lives. The passport will be accessed by the primary care physician, the oncologist and the patient.

Read more about Survivorship