$20 million toward research
Investing in innovative technologies to detect cancer early and advanced multi-cancer screening.
By funding the most promising new research, we contribute to some of the world’s most important advances in cancer prevention and early detection. In the past 35 years, we have funded more than 400 individual researchers and 480 research projects. Our grants and fellowships enable trailblazing research in emerging prevention interventions and accessible, low-cost screening technology.
Our size and structure make us nimble and able to quickly identify gaps in funding, respond to new discoveries and nascent research and swiftly pivot to provide funding where it is most needed.
We identify and fund emerging high-risk, high-reward projects in their earliest stages—confident in the downstream effect our initial funding will have on groundbreaking research and leap-ahead technology for generations to come.
From understanding how lung cancer develops in never-smokers and discovering the connection between liver inflammation and liver cancer, to developing noninvasive tests for ovarian cancer and identifying biomarkers for skin cancer, we’re funding the work that can change the way we can detect cancer early—when treatment can be most successful.
“Slowly, drugs will be created…They will be produced by a new generation of scientists who understand that chemoprevention isn’t simply the wild imagining of dreamers, but a coherent and achievable approach to cancer control.”
—Dr. Craig Jordan, recipient of early-career funding from the Prevent Cancer Foundation, and the scientist who discovered the breast cancer preventive properties of tamoxifen, the first FDA-approved drug to prevent cancer.
Spotlight: Funding Innovation
Bringing cutting-edge breast cancer screening technology to Nigeria
Low-resource countries suffer a high incidence of cancer, with diagnoses often coming too late—when the disease is advanced and there are few options for treatment.
Thanks to a 2019 Prevent Cancer Foundation global community grant, Drs. Victoria Mango and Peter Kingham of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center are conducting a clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a new low-cost breast cancer screening device in Nigeria, where mammograms can be hard to obtain due to the expense, lack of access and lack of basic resources, equipment and radiologists.
The iBreast Exam is a handheld, radiation-free breast screening device that detects abnormal breast lumps as small as five millimeters that can be early signs of breast cancer. It allows health care workers to perform breast exams anywhere, determining within minutes who needs further testing or treatment.
The iBreast Exam is the biggest innovation in early breast cancer detection since the mammogram was widely introduced in 1963—and has already been used to screen more than a quarter million women worldwide. And when validated by the clinical trial, it will be just as useful in rural America as it is in Nigeria—in other words, if it works in Nigeria, it will work in medically underserved areas anywhere.
