Bicycling many miles through the Texas Hill Country in support of one of the world’s most well-known cancer-fighting charitable organizations probably sounds like a great way to spend an October day, no matter who you are. Here at the College of Natural Sciences (CNS), members of our community have yet another reason to support LIVESTRONG, the nonprofit organization that’s based in Austin and that serves cancer patients and their families the world over.
We see it as one more way to raise the profile of a broad movement that we, too, play a part in: the movement to improve the lives of people diagnosed with or at risk of developing cancer.
Over the weekend, Dean Linda Hicke and a team of representatives from CNS joined similar teams led by Dean Clay Johnston of the Dell Medical School and Dean Sharon Wood of the Cockrell School of Engineering for the LIVESTRONG Challenge bicycle ride in support of cancer patients and their families. The overall UT Austin contingent, which also included representatives of the Provost’s office and the McCombs School of Business, was among an estimated 2,000 riders helping to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer patient care, support, and services. Given that support for LIVESTRONG feeds directly back into support for students, families, faculty and programs on campus, not the least of which will be the LIVESTRONG Cancer Institutes of the Dell Medical School, it’s no surprise that the University had such a strong showing. The LIVESTRONG Foundation has committed to donating $50 million to found the new cancer institute.
Here at CNS, support for efforts to address cancer underscores our role in this movement. Where we fit is in providing groundbreaking research that holds the promise for better treatments, that improves science’s understanding of cancer, and that enriches our students’ educational experiences, so that some of them, too, will go on to professions and community endeavors of their own that reduce the disease’s toll. The College of Natural Sciences takes great pride in the cancer research that support for our faculty and students makes possible, such as:
- the discovery we highlighted earlier this summer, made by a research team including our own Jonathan Sessler who called finding a synthetic molecule that can make cancer self-destruct “a chemist’s dream”;
- innovations underway right now from Andreas Matouschek, in our Department of Molecular Biosciences, who is helping to develop a molecularly-targeted strategy to prevent breast cancer from forming;
- Linda deGraffenried in Nutritional Sciences, who found a link between using aspirin and reduced recurrences of breast cancer in overweight patients; and
- findings highlighted in the new edition of Endocrinology from marine scientist Peter Thomas about an apparent mechanism that causes cancer cells to kill themselves off.
Although just a sampling of recent cancer discoveries, these provide a view into the vital place of CNS research within a broader movement that aims to make a difference in the lives of people with cancer.
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