I am extremely proud of my dad.   I always have been and I always will be.  He is a superhero in the fight against childhood cancer.  

My dad is Dr. C. Patrick Reynolds and he has been doing incredible work for childhood cancer research.  One program that my dad and some of his colleagues across the USA have worked together on is the Pediatric Preclinical Testing Program (PPTP).

The PPTP is a national program funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which was formed to test anticancer drugs (most made for adult cancers) on laboratory models of childhood cancer. Those drugs that show promise can be moved into pediatric oncology clinical trials.  Unfortunately, the National Cancer Institute has cut the funding for the PPTP suddenly and without warning. Because of this, my dad and many other researchers that were testing drugs on childhood cancer in the laboratory are no longer able to carry out their work.

One of the problems with the loss of the PPTP funding is . . . that's not all.  The Children's Oncology Group (COG) had been providing a small amount of funding for the COG Cell Culture and Xenograft Repository. My dad's laboratory serves as the world wide childhood cancer cell line repository, sending laboratory models of childhood cancer to 15 countries.  

That funding all went away with the budget cuts the NCI imposed on the COG.

Here's a portion of an alarming email my dad sent me:

"We are having to reduce staff immediately and cut back on some ongoing work, but it's not a total disaster yet.  However without some funding in the very near future we will have to shut down all of pediatric cancer drug testing work and stop responding to requests from the many labs that depend on us for childhood cancer cell lines and xenografts."

 

There is no reason for this.  The NIH spends huge amounts of funding each year on basic research with no immediate clinical applications. Worth noting, the majority of funding for adult cancer research comes from the pharmaceutical industry, which provides no funding for childhood cancer.  The goal of the Pediatric Preclinical Testing Program is to test anticancer adult drugs in the lab to see if they will translate into fighting childhood cancers.

While adult cancer research is also getting funding cuts from the NCI, those cuts are a small portion of all the funding available to investigators studying adult cancers. However, the cuts to pediatric oncology are devastating because the majority of funding for childhood cancer research, and all funding for any drug testing for children with cancer, comes from the NCI.  

The bottom line is this: Without adequate funding from the NCI, researchers spend their time scrambling to write grants in order make up for lost funds instead of focusing solely on research.  

I created this fundraising page to raise awareness and much needed funding for childhood cancer research.