When St. Jude Children's Research Hospital opened for business on 4 Feb 1962 led by entertainer Danny Thomas, children who were diagnosed with most forms of cancer were regarded as being untreatable. Overall survival rates for childhood cancers hovered around 20 percent.
In the half-century since—owing in no small part to the tireless and brilliant researchers, doctors, staff and of course patients of St. Jude's—overall survival rates have risen to 80 percent, an unthinkable advance at the time.
Some other major milestones at St. Jude's include when, in 1971, St. Jude investigators made a major breakthrough in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common childhood cancer and at the time, considered universally fatal: they determined that combination chemotherapy plus radiation cured at least half of all ALL patients. Today that figure is closer to 95 percent.
In 1984, A St. Jude patient suffering from sickle cell disease is the first such patient to be cured with a bone marrow transplant.
Said James R. Downing, M.D., St. Jude's scientific director and deputy director. "St. Jude has a legacy of taking on the toughest of pediatric cancer questions, and that focus won't change. We're uniquely positioned as an institution to move research and treatment ahead. From the genetic data we collect from the genome project, we're creating the foundation of knowledge to deliver the next decades' childhood cancer discoveries and treatments."
Source: MarketWatch
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