To find cures for children with cancer and other life-threatening disease through research and treatment. And no family ever pays St. Jude for anything.
Why do we exist?
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, founded by the late entertainer Danny Thomas, opened in 1962. The mission of St. Jude is to find cures for children with cancer and other deadly diseases through research and treatment.
Treatments invented at St. Jude have helped push the overall survival rate for childhood cancer from 20 percent since the hospital opened to more than 80 percent today. St. Jude is working to drive the overall survival rate for childhood cancer to 90 percent in the next decade. St. Jude won’t stop until no child dies from cancer.
St. Jude freely shares the breakthroughs it makes, and every child saved at St. Jude means doctors and scientists worldwide can use that knowledge to save thousands more children.
St. Jude has treated children from all 50 states and around the world. And no family ever receives a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food – because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.
What have you accomplished?
In 2010, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital launched the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project, in collaboration with Washington University, to find clues to the causes of childhood cancer and potential new treatments and cures. To do this, researchers planned to sequence the complete cancerous and healthy genomes of 600 childhood cancer patients within three years. The project exceeded that goal, resulting in 700 sequenced genomes of tumors and 700 matched normal tissue. Before this project, not even one whole pediatric cancer genome had ever been sequenced. The project has resulted in ground-breaking discoveries in a number of different aggressive childhood cancers including retinoblastoma, medulloblastoma, neuroblastoma, diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, two aggressive forms of leukemia and low-grade gliomas. In February 2013, the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project was recognized as one of TIME magazine’s top 100 new scientific discoveries.
The National Cancer Institute has designated St. Jude as a Comprehensive Cancer Center, the only one devoted solely to children. In 1962 the survival rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood cancer, was 4 percent. Thanks to research and treatment plans developed at St. Jude, the survival rate for ALL is 94 percent.
St. Jude’s brain tumor science and technology are at the cutting edge worldwide, and St. Jude has the largest research-based pediatric brain tumor research program in the country. St. Jude is the national coordinating center for the national Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium, which receives funding from the National Cancer Institute.
St. Jude was the first institution to cure sickle cell disease with a bone marrow transplant and has one of the largest pediatric sickle cell disease programs in the country.