Spring 2025
By Kathy Clute
Photography by Josh Campbell, Sam Ogden
A cancer diagnosis often brings fear, anxiety, and very real worries about how to pay for care or manage weeks or months of treatment. These concerns can be particularly acute for people in under-resourced or medically underserved communities, as they have higher rates of disease and often experience barriers to accessing and receiving care.
Funds from The Dana-Farber Campaign expand access, allowing us to reach even more patients and families by bringing high-quality treatments to underserved populations of all races or ethnicities, hastening the pace and reach of our clinical trials, and working to address disparities in cancer prevention, care, outcomes, and survivorship.
One example is the community-facing patient navigators who provide hands-on support to newly diagnosed patients who may need assistance overcoming obstacles to treatment for blood, breast, gastrointestinal, thoracic, gynecologic, and genitourinary cancers. Insurance does not pay for these services—the program is entirely funded by The Dana-Farber Campaign.
“I’m there to help with anything: transportation, food, anything that would hinder them from coming to their appointments and being successful in treatment,” said Judy Thyme, MSPH, the patient navigator for the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology. Since 2021, Thyme and her colleagues across six different types of cancer have helped nearly 600 patients via more than 4,000 touchpoints.
The Patient Navigation Program is just one initiative of the Institute’s Cancer Care Equity Program, established in 2012. Campaign funding subsidizes on-site clinics at two Boston community health centers, community cancer screenings, education and trust building programs, and research that includes more than 90 active clinical research studies and pilot programs aimed at uncovering and eliminating disparities in cancer care.
EQUITY IN ACTION
Adolescent and Young Adult Neuro-Oncology
Dana-Farber created this program and its multidisciplinary clinic in 2020 to bring highly specialized care to adolescents and young adult patients (ages 15-39) with brain tumors or other malignancies of the central nervous system.
Neuro-inclusive care
Adult patients with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities can benefit from the Institute’s new Neuro-Inclusive Care and Empowerment Program, launched in 2024.
Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Center
The Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Center, established in 2019, is one of the first of its kind to focus on understanding and treating the growing incidence of colorectal cancer in people diagnosed before age 50.
Tackling inequities in pediatric cancer
Even if they receive high-quality treatment, children with cancer from low-income households are more likely to experience a relapse or to die than their peers in higher-income families.
In a bold step to address this stark disparity, Dana-Farber is a founding member of IGNITE, a research consortium of pediatric oncology experts from 12 leading institutions nationwide. Established in 2024, it will focus on testing and scaling interventions that target social drivers of health such as poverty, food insecurity, housing instability, and lack of transportation.
“Instead of testing new drugs, we’ll be testing supportive care interventions that can change the landscape of pediatric cancer care for the better,” said pediatric oncologist Kira Bona, MD, MPH.
African DNA yields prostate cancer clues
It’s well-known that men of African descent have the world’s highest incidence of prostate cancer. But most of the studies documenting the genetic underpinnings of the disease have focused on individuals of European ancestry.
To remedy that, Dana-Farber researcher Timothy Rebbeck, PhD, co-led a study that analyzed the DNA of nearly 7,500 men in East, West, and South Africa—more than half of whom had the disease. They identified 15 risk factors in the men’s genomes, four of which had not been previously linked to prostate cancer. Their findings, published in Nature Genetics in 2024, help explain the elevated prostate cancer rates across the African diaspora and show why studying diverse populations is so important.
“Going forward, our work can be used to develop better risk assessment models for African American men and guide them to proper screening and treatment,” Rebbeck said.