The Mary Kay Foundation recently announced $1.3 million in grants to support research willing to fight cancers that affect women, such as breast or cervical cancers.
Cancer is currently the second leading cause of death in women with over 800,000 new cases diagnosed every year in the country, according to the American Cancer Society.
A total of 13 projects conducted at top medical schools and research facilities throughout the country will receive funding from the Foundation, and each of the awardees will be granted $100,000. “Support from The Mary Kay Foundation has enabled promising projects to further cancer research and discovery, ultimately leading to improved longevity and quality of life for thousands of cancer patients,” stated the chair of the foundation’s Research Review Committee, Jerry W. Shay, PhD.
The projects were selected by a committee which reviewed over 60 applications from the most prestigious American institutions. The review committee includes prominent medical scientists and doctors that choose the most promising research projects to be supported by the foundation. These highly competitive grants are part of the May Kay Foundation’s mission to help advance research on cancers that affect women. Since its creation in 1996, the foundation has already granted over $22 million.
“Research is at the heart of the relentless pursuit to help prevent, detect and treat cancer each and every day in the United States. From new therapies to early detection tools, grants like these give scientists the opportunity to pursue such goals,” explanined Shay, who is also a professor and vice chairman of the Department of Cell Biology for The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
This round of funding embraces a wide spectrum of research fields. The awardees from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colo., will explore new methods to prevent and treat cervical cancer, while the awarded scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle, Wash., will invest the grant to study the use of DNA collected from routine Pap smears to improve early detection of ovarian cancer.
“While The Mary Kay Foundation’s Cancer Research Grant Program is focused exclusively on cancers affecting women, we know the Foundation’s grants have fueled research benefiting all cancers,” said the Chairman of the The Mary Kay Foundation’s Board and Mary Kay Inc. Senior Vice President of Public Affairs, Michael Lunceford. “By continuing to support top medical scientists at some of the best and most-respected research institutions in the country, we know we are advancing the fight against cancer while continuingMary Kay’s mission of enriching women’s lives.”