.png)
We spoke with Kari McHugh, Chief Communications Officer at Break Through Cancer, about the organization's mission, its collaborative approach to osteosarcoma research, and how the Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab is helping accelerate discoveries for children and families affected by the disease.
For those who aren't familiar, can you tell us about Break Through Cancer and its mission?
Break Through Cancer’s mission is to empower outstanding researchers and physicians to intercept and find cures for the deadliest cancers by stimulating radical collaboration. To do this, we bring together experts from leading research institutions including Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to work together in one coordinated team or ‘TeamLab’.
TeamLabs bring together doctors, scientists, engineers, and data experts across institutions and disciplines. TeamLabs are the signature engine of our model: deeply integrated, multi-institutional research teams working in real-time to solve focused cancer challenges, break through silos, and accelerate translation from discovery to patient benefit.
What inspired Break Through Cancer to support osteosarcoma research, and why is this work so important?
For more than 40 years, treatment for osteosarcoma has changed very little, leaving children, adolescents, and their families with far too few options. At Break Through Cancer, we saw both a compelling scientific opportunity to accelerate new discoveries and an extraordinary community committed to making that happen. Families, advocates, foundations, and researchers came together around a shared belief that progress would come faster through collaboration.
Together, we launched the Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab, a $15M initiative that brings together leading researchers, patient organizations, and family philanthropists in an unprecedented effort to accelerate new discoveries. Children with osteosarcoma deserve more than incremental progress, they deserve a bold, coordinated effort to change the future of this disease.
The Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab includes collaborators from Dana-Farber, Johns Hopkins, MD Anderson, Memorial Sloan Kettering, BC Cancer, Stanford, UCSF, and Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.
What are some of the current osteosarcoma research initiatives or collaborations you're most excited about?
A particularly exciting area of this research is the TeamLab's paired pediatric–canine research program. Because osteosarcoma is much more common in pet dogs than in children, researchers have a unique opportunity to learn from naturally occurring disease in dogs to help identify and evaluate promising new treatments. Those insights can help accelerate the development of better therapies for children, while also improving care for dogs with osteosarcoma. It's a remarkable example of how radical collaboration can help move the field forward faster.
One of Break Through Cancer's strengths is bringing institutions and researchers together. How has this collaborative approach helped make progress?
Our ten TeamLabs bring together more than 600 scientists from over 15 leading cancer research institutions and disciplines to tackle some of the toughest problems in cancer research. One exciting example comes from our Intercepting Ovarian Cancer TeamLab. At one of the team's earliest meetings, gynecologic surgeons described a longstanding challenge: while we know many ovarian cancers begin in the fallopian tube, finding the tiny precursor lesions is extraordinarily difficult because traditional pathology examines only a fraction of the tissue. That conversation sparked an unexpected collaboration with engineers at MIT, who brought an entirely new perspective to the problem. Together, the TeamLab developed new imaging technologies capable of scanning the entire fallopian tube and built a first-of-its-kind collaborative clinical study that allows surgical samples to move seamlessly between institutions so engineers, pathologists, and clinicians can refine these technologies while preserving routine patient care. It's exactly the kind of breakthrough that can happen when experts from different disciplines come together around a shared goal.
What gives you the most hope for the future of osteosarcoma research and patient outcomes?
What gives us the most hope is the physicians, scientists, engineers, and data scientists behind the Defying Osteosarcoma TeamLab have. It brings together world-leading experts across disciplines, combines some of the largest and richest collections of osteosarcoma data and biospecimens, and is supported by Break Through Cancer's dedicated Data Science Team. Working across all our disease areas, the Data Science TeamLab helps researchers integrate and analyze complex datasets, uncover patterns that might otherwise be missed, and generate insights more quickly. As the TeamLab continues to generate new clinical and research data, these capabilities will only become more powerful. Together, this creates an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate discoveries and, ultimately, improve outcomes for children and families affected by osteosarcoma.
Is there anything you'd like the osteosarcoma community to know about Break Through Cancer, or ways they can stay connected with your work?
The osteosarcoma community has shown what's possible when people come together around a shared mission, and we are honored to be part of that effort. Break Through Cancer is committed to supporting bold, collaborative science that has the potential to change outcomes for children and families. We look forward to sharing the TeamLab's progress in the years ahead and invite the community to stay connected through our newsletter, website, and social media channels as this work continues.
