First Time Visitors

This page is under “How You Can Help” because it’s also a great page to send to people you know if you think they might want to know more about Accelerate Progress.

Who are we?

Accelerate Progress is a recognized 501(c)3 public charity created to bring together the many groups necessary to assess, address, and improve the systems we use to develop, regulate, and use new therapies for patients fighting cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Our stated purpose is “to improve the rate at which new and clinically important therapeutic discoveries are translated into advancements for the management or cure of life threatening diseases, and to assure patient access to these treatments.”

In other words, we are working for faster progress, more options for patients, and a better system for everyone to support progress and options because that equals less suffering and death.

Why do we need Accelerate Progress?

The Short Answer

• 12-15 years is too long to wait for a new treatment if you’ve been diagnosed with cancer or another life-threatening disease.
• More than $1 billion is too much to have to spend to develop this treatment.
• The system can be improved so that it takes less time and costs less money to develop these therapies, while we actually increase the level of scientific rigor and speed our learning about new therapies and who will benefit most from them.
• There are many great organizations funding research against these terrible diseases.
• Our work makes their research dollars go further and, if you support them, helps them get more from your donation.
• Their rate of progress from research is limited not by their scientific talents, but by the efficiency of the system around them.
• They know research and that’s what they do.
• We know policy and how to use better policy and better science to accelerate progress and that’s what we do.
• Help us accelerate progress so we can help them deliver those new and better options to patients in need more quickly and economically.

The Longer Answer

What if you or a member of your family were diagnosed with cancer or another life-threatening disease?  Do you have 12-15 years to wait for a new treatment to be discovered and make its way through the translation, development, and regulatory review maze before finally reaching your doctor’s “shelf” as an option for your treatment?  Not likely.  Will you be able to raise the more than $1 billion it costs to take a new treatment from discovery to the “shelf” at the pharmacy?  More than 500,000 American men, women, and chidlren will die of cancer alone in 2008.  Given that the average late-stage cancer patient’s life expectancy is 12-18 months, there is no time to lose once you’re diagnosed.  There is no time for inefficient regulations that hamper collaboration and accelerated progress, misaligned incentives that stymie development efforts, and other common barriers to progress that keep us from translating our amazing advances in understanding the biology of these diseases into available treatment options for you and your doctor to use in your fight for life.

Thinking you might be able to get access to a new promising but experimental treatment that could save your life?  Sounds good, but the odds are against it, not because the treatments don’t exist, but because very, VERY few can get access to them.  Roughly 2-3% of all patients get enrolled into clinical trials for promising new treatments, for a variety of reasons, but often because some aspect of their disease (where it’s located, symptoms it has caused, etc.) make them ineligible.  Ask anyone who’s had a loved one or close friend fighting cancer try to get into a clinical trial.  It’s almost impossible and usually ends with a doctor uttering those awful, sickening words, “There is nothing more that we can offer you but some medication to ease your pain in your final days…” Read the recent article by one of our Scientific Advisors, Dr. Emil Freireich, where he uses two case studies of patients he’s treated to give real world examples of why getting patients access to these promising, safe, and effective therapies quickly and efficiently should be our goal.  The two individuals Dr. Freireich discusses lived 23 years and more than 10 years after hearing that fateful phrase and being told they should “get their affairs in order” and had no options.  How did they do it?  They were in that very fortunate 2-3% who manage to get enrolled.  Wouldn’t it be better if more than 2-3% of patients could benefit, could actually get access to something that might help them fight for their lives and win? 

In 2008 nearly 1.5 million people in the United States will be newly diagnosed with cancer.  Almost one in every two men and one in three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.  The National Institutes of Health estimate overall costs of cancer (including costs of the treatments, costs of hospital care, costs of support and fighting side effects, etc.) in 2007 at a staggering $219.2 billion.  The very real costs to your family of losing a loved one is not broken out by NIH, but ask anyone who’s lost one and their faces alone will tell how costly it was.  Our inefficient systems contribute to development times for these promising and potentially lifesaving new options that regularly exceed twelve years per drug and often require spending of more than $1 billion per drug developed. How many innocents have to die before we recognize that the system must be changed?

At Accelerate Progress, we’re focused on improving the rate at which new and clinically important therapeutic discoveries are translated into advancements for the management or cure of life threatening diseases, and to assure patient access to these treatments.  In other words, the improvements we’re pushing for would decrease the time necessary to bring new treatments to patients and decrease the costs of developing those new treatments.  Decreasing both of these allows companies to develop more options, which increases competition and provides for better personalization of treatment regimes for patients, and also supports development of options against more rare diseases than previously possible due to poor economics, further benefiting public health.  We will accomplish this while maintaining and even strengthening the scientific rigor of study by using better science and tools available now or that can be made available in the near future by providing leadership and support for them now. 

How will we Accelerate Progress?

Accelerate Progress centers our activities around two primary areas:

1) Policy:  At Accelerate Progress we use the term ‘action tank’ because we maintain a focus on not just generating great policy ideas, but actually translating those into actionable, implementable policy items and then taking action to help put them in place for broad use and adoption.  Current focus areas for policy research are:  diagnostics, trial design and analysis, regulatory, and other.

2) Key “Accelerating Science” Research: We are creating collaborations with leading academic and research institutions to advance work on adaptive trial designs, Bayesian statistical analyses, biomarker research and validation, diagnostic assay creation/validation, improved data and tissue collection and entry, and other areas that are not currently well-served by for profit organizations often due to lack of incentives.

Support for Accelerate Progress

In order to maintain our independent voice and allow us to act as an acceleration engine drawing from multiple constituences but beholden to none, we do not take funding from pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies developing therapies against life-threatening diseases.  With that in mind, a key to success for Accelerate Progress is to rapidly develop a broad funding base of partners (individuals and organizations) so that we can aggressively pursue these research opportunities that are, without question, available but waiting for someone to drive them, while also supporting the organizational policy work that is far less costly, but no less important.  Click here to see our 2009 expected milestones and funding support goals.

In summary, Accelerate Progress will lead by example and, through both policy and directing key scientific research in the areas described above, drive the changes necessary to truly accelerate our progress against cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

Examples of Accelerating Progress

Accelerate Progress is bringing together a Coalition for Faster Progress, a network of organizations and individuals committed to working together to overcome the common barriers to progress that we all recognize and face.  It is true that each disease brings with it a series of specific issues and hurdles to progress, but we recognize that no matter the size, scale, or disease focus of an organization, many of the barriers to progress are shared with all others in the system.  To bring attention to these common barriers and raise a common voice to call for improvements in the systems’ areas slowing progress, we invite additional organizations to and join our Coalition for Faster Progress. 

Where appropriate with our collaborative partners, we will offer trial design improvement suggestions (adding an adaptive design element to a trial, for instance, or creating a Bayesian statistical analysis plan for the trial) designed to accelerate the speed of the learning loop and allowing researchers to actually learn more and faster, delivering both faster improvements in new therapeutics (winners get accelerated, less efficacious or overly toxic offerings get pushed out more quickly as well) as well as better return on investment, including the reduction in redundant research efforts.  All data gathered will be entered into a publicly available database and available to be shared to help researchers everywhere make more and faster progress against diseases like cancer. 

Our world-class scientific advisors have already done an incredible amount to begin to foster this network of efficiency between disciplinary groups and between multiple constituents or stakeholders in the systems we use to discover, develop, translate, regulate, and use new therapies.  There is still much more to be done.  For those who support other research organizations, think of our role this way, “We don’t do a lot of the research you fund. We make a lot of the research you fund better.” Even in many of the most forward-thinking research organizations in the industry there is always room for evaluation, improvement, and increased network efficiency.  There will always be room until we have all these diseases cured.  Also, the fact that we’re focusing on improving policy, aimed at increasing systems efficiencies (with the broad system defined as starting with discovery and ending with patient/doctor access to a therapy and sub-systems defined as discovery, development, regulation, and use of those therapeutic agents), we have a strong second way to improve the effectiveness of the research you fund, because everyone in the system will benefit from more efficient and better designed systems and regulations. 

Putting experts like economist Alex Tabarrok and cancer researchers and academics like Phil Schein and practicing physicians and regulatory leaders like Scott Gottlieb (former Deputy Commissioner of the FDA) together with other key people will give us the ability to translate the immense scientific skill our advisory board possesses (and their strong ideas about how to improve those systems) into strong policy that is both actionable and implementable, so we move from a ‘policy tank’ approach to an ‘action tank’ follow through.

Who is it all for?

Our work is meant to benefit the public health.  That means current patients, future patients, and all of the other individuals and groups that work within or are affected by the systems we use to discover new therapeutics, translate those early discoveries into clinical candidates, push development of those candidates via clinical trials and progress, move the most safe and effective of those through the regulatory review and approval process, and ensure broad patient access to these new promising and potentially lifesaving therapeutics. 

A copy of the document we recently submitted to President-Elect Obama’s Transition team on health and FDA issues can be found here and will continue to be updated and built upon with further input from our expert team.  Sign up for our newsletter to be kept up to date and/or for more information or comment.

Accelerate Progress recognizes that in these systems, the opposite of “efficient” is not “inefficient” but “deadly” because delays caused by inefficiency contribute directly to suffering and death.  We know our systems can be improved, we know how to do it, and we need your help to make it happen.  Please take a step to help whether for yourself, to honor the memory of another, or to improve the future for those yet to come. 

We are a recognized 501(c)3 public charity under IRS regulations, so your donations (be they cash, stock, or other) are tax-deductible to the extent provided for by law.  We will provide a receipt for tax purposes after processing of your donation.  Check with your tax advisor for additional information. 

If you would prefer to donate via check or other method, please You can use the buttons below to donate either via Paypal or via JustGive.org (which also allows you to set up recurring donations, etc.) or just click this link JustGive.org Donation Page for Accelerate Progress for our donations page at JustGive.org.

Also, do your shopping at iGive and help support Accelerate Progress!  iGive brings together a lot of leading retailers, including Amazon, Coldwater Creek, Land’s End, Patagonia, Lane Bryant, Overstock.com, and so many more, and if you shop from their iGive website to these retailers, Accelerate Progress receives a small percentage (from about 2-20%, averages around 3%) of your purchase and you don’t have to do anything else.  Just register at iGive and shop away!  Click the link below and it will start you on your way, knowing that Accelerate Progress sent you! 

http://www.iGive.com/AccelerateProgress