How much further could we get if we all worked together? That’s the question cancer researchers, healthcare providers and foundations like Swifty have found ourselves asking more and more. In the battle against children’s brain cancer, everyone belongs on the same side.
And yet, too often we’re competing.
As researchers struggle for grant money and organizations struggle for donors, there’s a tendency for a culture of secrecy to grow. Researchers keep their findings to themselves – and others end up retesting disproved theories or repeating data analysis.
That’s a waste of time, money and research tissue. And it leaves our children waiting.
We must strive to collaborate, not compete, in our work to find a cure.
When we work together, we get further faster. The more data that’s available to researchers and doctors and the more efficiently cancer foundations operate, the more progress we’ll make toward better treatments.
And yet, that’s not what always happens.
When it comes to beating cancer, the costs of working separately are high:
- Researchers retread the same ground. Because researchers must compete for grant funding, there’s a tendency to keep negative findings private. In other words, successes are shared in publications, but failures are not. This creates redundancy when one researcher spends time and money disproving a theory that another researcher has already disproved.
- That’s why Swifty’s national post-mortem tissue donation program, Gift from a Child, has partnered with the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN). CBTN shares tissue and data worldwide at no expense except researchers must share findings that are added to CBTN’s database. This reduces redundancy, allows researchers to learn from one another and build off of each other’s findings.
To make faster progress in treating pediatric brain cancer, researchers must share data openly as required by our partner, the CBTN.
With your support, that’s what the Swifty Foundation is doing through our Gift from a Child program and our partnership with the CBTN.