St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital - Saving Lives

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, founded by the late entertainer Danny Thomas, maintains 60 inpatient beds and treats about 260 patients each day, about 5,100 in active status, most of whom are treated on an outpatient basis.

• St. Jude is the first institution established for the sole purpose of conducting basic and clinical research and treatment into catastrophic childhood diseases, mainly cancer. St. Jude continues to be the only National Cancer Institute–funded cancer center devoted solely to children.

• St. Jude has treated children from all 50 states and from around the world.

• Research findings at St. Jude are shared with doctors and scientists all over the world. St. Jude also enjoys a worldwide reputation as a teaching facility. The medical and scientific staff published more than 500 articles in academic journals in 2006, more than any other pediatric cancer research center in the United States.

• St. Jude is the only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatment not covered by insurance. No child is ever denied treatment because of the family’s inability to pay.

• St. Jude continues an extensive expansion program to bolster the hospital’s research and treatment efforts, while more than doubling the size of its original campus. The expansion already includes the Children’s GMP, LLC, the nation’s only pediatric research center on-site facility for the research and production of highly specialized treatments and vaccines; an expanded
Department of Immunology; and a new Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics for discovery of new drugs.

• The new Chili’s Care Center integrates patient care and research where rapidly evolving CT (computerized tomography) and MR (magnetic resonance) technologies will keep St. Jude at the cutting edge for radiation therapy in a pediatric/adolescent setting. Additionally, a state-of-the-art cyclotron will enable St. Jude researchers to undertake many important new PET (positron emission tomography) studies not possible to do at St. Jude until now. These imaging techniques will facilitate the rapid evaluation of new therapeutic approaches and help choose those most likely to be successful.

• The daily operating cost for St. Jude is $1,267,349, which is primarily covered by public
contributions.

• During the past three years, 85.3 percent of every dollar received by St. Jude has gone to the current and future needs of the hospital.

• St. Jude pioneered a combination of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to treat childhood cancers.

• Peter C. Doherty, PhD, of the St. Jude Immunology department, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996. He shares the award with Rolf M. Zinkernagel, MD, of the University of Zurich. Their findings have led to breakthroughs in the understanding and treatment of viral infections and cancers, and in the development of organ transplant procedures and vaccines.

• Since its inception, St. Jude has developed protocols that have helped push survival rates for childhood cancers from less than 20 percent to more than 70 percent overall. The current St. Jude survival rates for selected childhood cancers now include:

Diagnosis Survival Rate Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), most common form of childhood cancer 94% Hodgkin disease (cancer of the lymph system) 90% Medulloblastoma (a type of brain tumor) 85% Wilms tumor (kidney tumor) 90%

• In 1962, the survival rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood cancer, was 4 percent. Today, the survival rate for this once deadly disease is 94 percent thanks to research and treatment protocols developed at St. Jude.

• St. Jude patients are referred by a physician, and generally have a disease currently under study and are eligible for a current research protocol on clinical research trials.

• St. Jude researchers and doctors are treating children with genetic immune defects and pediatric AIDS, as well as using new drugs and therapies to fight infections.

• St. Jude is a World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza Viruses in Animals and Birds.

• St. Jude was the first facility outside the National Institutes of Health to receive federal approval for research involving human gene therapy.

• The St. Jude faculty includes three National Academy of Sciences members: Peter C. Doherty, PhD, of Immunology; Charles Sherr, MD, PhD, of Tumor Cell Biology; and Robert Webster, PhD, of Infectious Diseases. Sherr and Brenda Schulman, PhD, Structural Biology, hold the coveted title of Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators.

• The St. Jude faculty also includes three members of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences: William E. Evans, PharmD, St. Jude director and chief executive officer; Arthur Nienhuis, MD, of Hematology and former director and CEO; and Charles Sherr, MD, PhD, of Tumor Cell Biology.

• St. Jude is the national coordinating center for the National Cancer Institute–funded Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium. St. Jude is the coordinating center for the nationwide Children’s Cancer Survivor Study, funded by the National Cancer Institute. St. Jude is the national coordinating center for the National Cancer Institute–sponsored Pediatric Drug Discovery Consortium. St. Jude is the coordinating center for a national study of sickle cell disease treatment funded by National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Cancer Institute.

Information taken from St. Jude 2007

Resources Links

Watch Matts Video

Visit St. Jude

Dr. Gajjar and Staff

The Kenny Can Foundation

Dentists with a Dream