For Your Consideration

I want to put in another plug for my brother's Pan-Massachusetts Challenge ride in August. I mentioned it a while ago, soon after I first started writing the blog.

Here's the PMC Mission Statement:

The Pan-Massachusetts Challenge raises money for life-saving cancer research and treatment at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through an annual bike-a-thon that crosses the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Since its founding in 1980, the PMC has successfully melded support from committed cyclists, volunteers, corporate sponsors and individual contributors. All are essential to the PMC's goal and model: to attain maximum fundraising efficiency while increasing its annual gift. Our hope and aspiration is to provide Dana-Farber's doctors and researchers the necessary resources to discover cures for all cancers.
The link to the web page is http://www.pmc.org/


There are a few different rides, covering anywhere from 84 to 180 miles. Mike will be riding 163 miles over two days. He's still looking for donations, and all donations will be happily accepted. If you want to send a check to my brother, make it out to PMC and send it to his home address: 7 Village Gate Rd, Canton, MA 02021.


You can also donate on-line, by credit card. Each rider has a personal web page where credit card donations may be made. Mike's page is:
http://www.pmc.org/mypmc/profiles.asp?Section=story&eGiftID=MM0386


If anyone has trouble with the link, his page is also available by going to the main site: http://www.pmc.org/ and clicking on the PMC Profiles section on the left. From there, you can look up his page by entering his name.

Mike's personal fundraising goal is $5,000 this year. He's been riding on the weekends with a group of people from Stoughton, MA (also the location of my niece Nicole's archrivals in soccer; her allowing him to associate with them says how important this is to both of them). The rest of the team members have all participated in the PMC over the past few years. Mike says their training rides have been 30 – 35 miles in distance, and they're slowly working up to 50-75 miles. Says Mike, "Thankfully, I was smart enough to upgrade from my 25 year old Schwinn for something lighter, an 18 gear bike. I must admit a bit of Pee Wee Herman exuberance comes over me when I saddle up."

(Mike didn't provide that Pee Wee link -- that was all mine. And since we're at it, here's Pee Wee eating his Mr. T cereal. Did you know that Mr. T is a lymphoma survivor?)

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But seriously, this is why the Pan-Mass Challenge is important:


Cancer drugs are developed by large pharmaceutical companies, and while I really hate that they keep showing male dysfunction drug commercials during American Idol when my kids are watching, I've come to appreciate the work they do in this area. (Cancer, I mean.)

But other treatments are being developed by independent cancer centers like Dana-Farber, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Dana-Farber has a long history of developing some very innovative cancer therapies, and they have a whole bunch of "firsts" in research into how and why cancers behave as they do, and how to make that stop. A large number of those innovations are in blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia. Right now, they are on the forefront of research in autologous stem cell transplants (where they harvest blood stem cells from the patient himself) and those cool individualized lymphoma vaccines I've written about. At the moment, they are conducting about 400 different clinical trials for cancer therapies; 57 of them are for Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.


Many of the studies are funded by grants and donations and other fundraisers like the Pan-Mass Challenge.


Times are tough, but please consider making a donation to my brother's ride. Every little bit helps.




Thanks.