Cancer Prevention Initiative Inc

Programs: The heritx mission is to prevent inherited cancers. The first program, launched in 2015, is the global heritx initiative to prevent inherited brca cancers (the heritx initiative), which was publicly launched in november 2015 with a historic banbury conference at cold spring harbor laboratory. The banbury conference resulted in the first research and development (r&d) roadmap to prevent inherited brca cancer, which is now guiding research worldwide. Following the conference, heritx connected with more than 200 research groups to identify ideas to prevent brca cancers, and carefully selected the most promising ideas to be advanced with heritx support. Heritxs work includes co-design of all research with input from the heritxs scientific team, which includes heritxs drug development expertise. Heritx awarded 7 research grants totaling approximately $1,900,000 in 2017. These grants included five grants for an international collaborative cancer prevention vaccine project at the netherlands cancer institute, dana-farber cancer institute, johns hopkins university and isa pharmaceuticals. Other grants included projects at womens college hospital in toronto and at baylor college of medicine to identify substances that improve the function of broken brca genes.

heritx continued to expand the prevention advocacy network (pan) in 2017. The goal of the pan is to bring the voice of the brca community to the research and development process, including decisions on research direction and priorities. Pan forums in 2017 were held in kanas city, missouri in collaboration with the male breast cancer coalition and in calgary, canada in collaboration with the hboc society. The pan is a community engagement platform that will ensure that prevention research focuses on a future preventive therapy that will meet the needs of the community not only in terms of the level of risk reduction but also in terms of convenience and side effects. Today, surgery is the only option for preventing brca cancers. Many women choose this route, removing breasts and ovaries and enduring the consequences inability to breastfeed their children, loss of sensation, and surgical menopause among others. But brca families want their daughters to have better options. Safe effective prevention that leaves people healthy and whole is desperately needed. Men carrying a brca mutation do not have any acceptable options at all, and a preventive therapy for brca cancers therefore also needs to protect people from brca prostate, pancreatic and skin cancers. The pan serves as a mechanism to gather and funnel patient input to the researchers dedicated to brca prevention research. Through the pan, families can voice their vision for a better future without surgery and can be sure that their needs will be heard by researchers because heritx is incorporating these community needs into its research agenda and scientific conferences. In addition to the pan, heritx has extended its community outreach and education initiatives through multiple speaking engagements, community forums and educational programs, including participating as the keynote speaker at the hboc societys annual "risky genes" conference, a presentation in the opening session of the global precision medicine leaders summit, and a segment on good morning america about the cancer prevention vaccine program that aired on memorial day 2017.