Advocacy, Research, and TNCI with Beth Anne Baber

"Eight years ago, a 15 month-old little boy with platinum blond ringlets and bright blue eyes was diagnosed with high-risk neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer that results in around 255 deaths/year in the United States. Based on the size, location and maturity of his tumor, the toddler had less than 50% chance to live long enough to attend kindergarten... Unlike most parents of children newly diagnosed with cancer, these parents were armed with decades of knowledge and experience in working with very same drugs that their son would receive intravenously. They knew about genetic markers and how these markers could predict their son's prognosis and response to these drugs. Even though the biopsy indicated the child's cancer was extremely aggressive, a genetic marker suggested otherwise; today he is a 13 year-old with no evidence of disease..."

The Nicholas Conor Institute was founded out of the parents sheer frustration of knowing that existing technology and academic discoveries are not being further developed to save the lives of other children with cancer.   Beth Anne Baber, CEO, joins us to share her son's story and to discuss this incessant and gnawing motivation for many parent-advocates:  Why are existing technology and academic discoveries not being further developed for our children, adolescents and young adults?  The answers are clear, and with increased activism and awareness of the realities so many children and their families are expected to endure, the solutions are visibly on the horizon for the childhood cancer community.

 

 

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About Janet


Blessed with varied interests and an artistic and musical upbringing, Janet had health challenges throughout her young adult life. Despite these she graduated Cum Laude from Wellesley College with an award of distinction for acting, and had also been a champion equestrian. She began a family with her husband Barry later in life, and had finally found happiness with daughter Sophie-Marie (3/12/06) and then baby (Jack 8/30/08). Five weeks after his birth, the family escaped a wildfire in which all worldly possessions were lost. The family relocated in December of 2008 to Agua Dulce CA where they currently reside.

Jack began to have unsettling symptoms at the age of 3; he was taken to Children's Hospital Los Angeles and was diagnosed with DIPG, or diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, on Friday Oct. 28, 2011, indisputably the darkest experience of Janet's life. The outrage of it made her determined to find the good in the situation, and she asked God to "Put me to work!" After Jack's death, she remained determined to start working to find solutions to DIPG and incorporated Jack's Angels at the end of 2012; the Foundation began its work in 2013. Despite the fact that DIPG is responsible for the majority of brain tumor deaths in children, she had been told there were no solutions for Jack because "the numbers aren't great enough for investors." This remains the primary motivation in her advocacy work, to prioritize children's lives in our medical system in the United States.