Dear donors and friends,

As you know, it has been almost two years since we lost our dear friend and colleague Judy Nicholson to kidney cancer.  To honor her memory, Judy’s family and friends have created the Judy Nicholson Foundation (JNF) to support local research and early detection programs to improve outcomes for patients with kidney cancer.  In support of this mission, the JNF has partnered with three kidney cancer research doctors at Mayo Clinic Florida: Alexander Parker, Winston Tan, and David Thiel.  According to Dr. Tan, “we are losing too many patients to kidney cancer. Once it becomes metastatic, it is rarely curable.  Therefore, as an oncologist, I am excited by the possibility for our research to provide a better understanding of why kidney cancer is so resistant to cure.  Moreover, we can translate this understanding into the development of new treatments for these patients.”  Dr. Thiel adds, “Kidney cancer remains a disease for which surgery is the only cure.  Motivated by this, our research to develop new minimally invasive surgical techniques for kidney cancer will have great impact on the quality of life of these patients.” 

In the first year of this new partnership, two key research initiatives were directly supported by JNF funding:

Dr. Parker evaluated awareness of risk factors for kidney cancer and found that only about 35% of individuals could correctly identify that smoking, obesity and hypertension increase the risk of developing kidney cancer. These findings underscore the need to raise awareness of the risk factors for kidney cancer to create successful prevention efforts. Dr. Parker’s findings were recently presented as an oral lecture at the 2010 meeting of the American Urological Association in San Francisco, one of the world’s largest medical meetings.  Funds from the JNF supported the design, completion and data analysis for this study. 

Support from the JNF allowed Mayo researchers to augment an existing grant from the Department of Defense to include additional work that will explore whether biomarkers in the blood could be used to enhance early detection of kidney cancer in high risk patients.  The ultimate goal of this research is to develop new blood-based tests to detect kidney cancer in its earliest stages when it is most curable.

We are excited by these two accomplishments and are eager to support more of this critical work. I hope you will take a look at the enclosed fact sheet on kidney cancer and the many advances that can be made with sufficient research funding.  If you are inspired as I am by this work, please consider making a contribution to the JNF. Your donation to the JNF will stay here in Jacksonville and be used to fund this groundbreaking work by Mayo Clinic Florida researchers. In addition to making a generous gift to the Foundation, please plan to join us at our signature event, Art for HOPE, at the Palm Valley Gardens the evening of Thursday, August 26^th.

Sincerely,

The Judy Nicholson Foundation

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