I often get asked are we winning the war on cancer and also why do we need to raise all this money from the lotteries?

While I am not a scientist I do get to hear from people like Dr. Ben Neel, who joined us last year from Harvard Medical School, and now heads up the research arm of The Princess Margaret.

Let me first address the question: Are we winning the war on cancer? I am not sure if you are aware that there are over 200 types of cancer and that progress has indeed been made on many cancers.

Dr. Ben Neel and many other scientists absolutely believe we are winning the war. Breakthroughs in the understanding of cancer stem cells that were discovered at The Princess Margaret, new understanding of risk factors associated with certain forms of cancer, and new targeted therapies are saving lives and extending lives everyday. I have attached a recent article from The Toronto Star which expands on this.

In fact, in the area of breast cancer alone, the most prevalent cancer for women, death rates have declined in all age groups since the late 1980’s. New treatments and early detection have been a significant contributing factor to this progress. We have seen some major triumphs in cancer medicine. Childhood leukemia and some adult leukemia have excellent survival rates. Some lymphomas and testicular cancers also can be cured if caught early. And we now have a preventative vaccine for cervical cancer for women.

However, more work must be done because people are still dying from this disease.

Progress has been made and back in l977 little was known about cancer and its origin. But today in 2008, we know that cancer is a disease of the genome and cancer is a disease of development. However, translating our cancer knowledge and discoveries into new treatments can take over 12 years just for one new treatment and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Why do we need to raise all this money from the lotteries? The lotteries are our single source of critical funding for our cancer research efforts at The Princess Margaret and over the last 11 years they have raised more than $167 million dollars for cancer research. They are vital to us! We would not have been able to build our world class research program at The Princess Margaret without the lottery monies, so I do hope you will continue to support us. The doctors and scientists at The Princess Margaret are doing amazing work, I see it everyday. While we are still losing people to cancer we really do believe significant progress has been made and many more people survive their cancer.