This holiday season, ditch the guilt of spending and make a purchase that combines the good feelings of giving and charitable giving by shopping online through iGive.com and Goodshop.com. With partnerships from over 1,500 popular stores on both [...]
“The skydive was awesome!” says Stacey McAully. On October 24, Stacey, her sister, Sammy, and their best friend, Gemma Day skydived to raise money for The Sarcoma Trust, a UK charity which funds research into [...]
Life Rafter and GIST survivor David Safford is hosting a benefit concert on Valentine’s Day to raise funds and awareness for the LRG’s research project Pathway to a Cure. After being diagnosed with GIST, Dave [...]
Written by Helga Schnorf On April 23, 2010, ninety GIST patients, relatives, GIST experts, and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry attended the Seventh meeting of the Swiss GIST group. Special guests included Anna Costato from Italy, [...]
On Saturday October 23, the first regional meeting of Colombian GIST patients was held in the city of Bogotá and sponsored by Novartis-Colombia. With the participation of 20 delegates, the attendees were instructed on the [...]
The Life Raft Group’s Annual Holiday Giving Campaign has been kicked off to a great start! This comes as no surprise to the LRG; our close knit group of GIST patients, families and friends are [...]
This December, I will have been working with cancer patients for six years at the Life Raft Group. I have held their hands in hospital beds, coached them on how to talk with their doctors, stood by their side at the weddings of friends, walked with them through haunted houses and comforted their loved ones when they had nothing left.
On November 18, the Life Raft Group’s Board President Jerry Cudzil hosted this year’s Seventh Annual Life Raft Group Poker Tournament at the Midtown Loft in New York City. With over seventy-five guests and ninety-five [...]
On April 12, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American College of Surgeons (ACOSOG) and Novartis pharmaceuticals announced that a phase III trial studying Gleevec use to prevent recurrence in patients whose primary Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumor (GIST) had been removed by surgery would be ended early because it had met its primary endpoint of increasing recurrence free survival with a statistically significant hazard ratio of 3.1.
In presentations at the 2010 American Society of Clinical Oncologists conference (ASCO), Dr. Ronald DeMatteo, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and Dr. Chris Corless, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), presented new data from the Z9001 adjuvant Gleevec trial. As Dr. DeMatteo noted, the presentations were geared towards answering two questions: Who should get adjuvant Gleevec and how long should they get it for? While the presentations went a long way towards answering who should get adjuvant Gleevec, there appears to be much that we do not know about how long they should get it for. Other ongoing trials may help shed more light on this question.
