MINNEAPOLIS — Cancer patients always deserve to be celebrated. But a new American Cancer Society event intends to specifically honor women who are fighting cancer in a different way.
The event, called ResearcHERS, brings local, Society-funded, female researchers to the McNamara Alumni Center Thursday for a luncheon and awards ceremony. A partnership with TeamWomen is also expected to be announced.
And Dr. Zohar Sachs plans to share a few words. She's an assistant professor of medicine in the University of Minnesota's hematology, oncology and transplantation division.
Simply put, she specializes in blood cancers. Not only is she a doctor, but she also runs a lab at the Masonic Cancer Center on campus.
"The work people like us do in the lab has led to just tremendous new drugs, medications, for us to treat these patients and to extend these peoples' lives," Sachs said. "It's very exciting, as a leukemia doctor, to be able to offer new things because when I started my practice in 2012, we hardly had anything. We were using the same old chemotherapy that we had been using for almost 40 years."
Even with the "explosion of new drugs" available today, Sachs is forced to deliver the worst news to some patients. Typically, their diagnosis is Acute Myeloid Leukemia, one of the worst bone marrow cancers, she says.
"I know that they're not going to live more than three to six months," she said. "It is completely heartbreaking. It is unbearable as a physician to look at a patient and say, 'We're going to do X, Y, and Z, but get your affairs in order and whoever you should see, you should see them right away.'"
Some medications do effectively control AML for a short period of time but patients still die within three to six months, Sachs says. That's why about a year ago, she and her research team revised the lab's approach to focus on this particular leukemia sub-type.
"There are a bunch of sick patients that I can't cure and so it seems very natural for me to go into the lab and try to find ways to make it better," Sachs said. "The new hot topic, at least in our field, is single-cell technology so we can look within a single cell and figure out a lot of the molecular features of the single cells."
But research costs money.
According to the American Cancer Society, when researchers request funds for the first time from the National Institute of Health, women receive almost $40,000 less than men. Yet they're expected to deliver the same results.
The inequality is what prompted ResearcHERS to establish these three goals:
- Monetary support
- Mentoring opportunities
- Creating an awareness platform for female researchers
"If we want to make sure that we do good cancer research in this country, we want to make sure that all the good cancer researchers are all supported," Sachs said. "Or at least, there is no systematic bias in the way cancer researchers are supported."
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