ABC²

The Cases' entrepreneurial skills and passion for investing in and supporting cutting-edge businesses inspire the work of Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure, a collaboration that has brought together venture capitalists, leading researchers and clinicians, government, industry leaders, and patients and their families.  Steve, who serves as chairman of the organization, said recently, "A cure for brain cancer may take more than a decade, but if we can limit the severity and growth of brain tumors, we can make brain cancer as manageable and treatable as AIDS or diabetes."
 
"The 'cancer world' gets stuck in its ways, and ABC² brings the entrepreneurial spirit to jar it loose," according to Dr. David Agus, a research director at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. "ABC² is a leader in medical research because it brings the technology, information science, and cancer worlds all together in one room. And you have all these remarkable people thinking about a systems problem, all these thinkers who had never thought about brain cancer before, and when they realized what they could do, there was and still is no stopping them."
 
ABC² has developed a unique system to give researchers from all backgrounds the support they need to make critical breakthroughs, and helps fund outstanding and novel translational science aimed at discovering a cure for brain cancer. Kate Carr, ABC²'s president and CEO, said, "ABC² has applied entrepreneurial and venture leverage principles and has achieved remarkable, measurable success in bringing more therapies to trial at an accelerated pace."
 
ABC² has made a number of accomplishments since its formation:

• Creating unique collaborations with industry to hasten the transfer of research from bench to bedside, including partnerships with Genentech and other leading biotech and pharmaceutical companies.


• Awarding 57 investigator awards at 22 institutions that have led to new approaches to customize therapies for individual patients -- giving meaning and reality to the era of personalized medicine; creating innovative methods to deliver promising agents to the brain for brain cancer and other brain disorders; and accelerating the development and evaluation of novel therapies.


• Entering more than 135 therapies/compounds into a preclinical screening network for testing against brain cancer -- at no cost to drug sponsors.
  


• Creating a Clinical Research Network to help rapidly move therapies into clinical studies, with charter members from four leading neuro-oncology centers -- Duke University; the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; the University of California, San Francisco; and University of California, Los Angeles.


• Breaking down the silos and bringing to the table academic research centers, industry, and government.