St. Jude Children's Research Hospital researches and treats pediatric catastrophic diseases, primarily childhood cancer. St. Jude covers all costs not paid by insurance. Research findings are shared worldwide.
Why do we exist?
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, founded by the late entertainer Danny Thomas, opened in 1962. Its mission is to find cures for children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. For almost 50 years, St. Jude has had a history of taking on many of the most difficult and underserved pediatric diseases.
St. Jude was the first pediatric institution to place doctors, scientists, and patients “all under one roof,” thus creating a worldwide model for “bench-to-bedside” research and treatment of cancers and other life-threatening diseases in children.
St. Jude has treated children from all 50 states and from around the world and is a national resource with a global impact. The research and care pioneered by St. Jude is freely shared with doctors all over the world so that children in communities everywhere have access to our groundbreaking research and lifesaving treatments.
St. Jude is the only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatments that are not covered by insurance. No child is denied treatment because of a family’s inability to pay.
What have you accomplished?
St. Jude is the first and only pediatric cancer center to be designated as a Comprehensive Cancer Center by the National Cancer Institute. As one of the world’s premier pediatric cancer research centers, St. Jude has developed protocols that have helped push overall survival rates for childhood cancers from less than 20 percent, when the hospital opened in 1962, to 80 percent today. St. Jude’s groundbreaking development of combination therapy for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood cancer, revolutionized leukemia therapy worldwide and increased the survival rate from 4 percent in 1962 to 94 percent today.
St. Jude’s brain tumor science and technology are at the cutting edge worldwide, and St. Jude has the largest protocol-based pediatric brain tumor research program in the country. St. Jude is the national coordinating center for the national Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium, which receives funding from the National Cancer Institute. St. Jude was the first to adapt a computer-based three-dimensional radiation therapy technique for pediatric brain tumor treatment to minimize damage to healthy tissue and preserve cognitive development in children.
St. Jude was the first institution to cure sickle cell disease with a bone marrow transplant and has one of the largest pediatric sickle cell disease programs in the country. St. Jude is also the first center to receive government approval for a unique transplant procedure that makes it possible for parents who are not exact matches to be bone marrow donors for their children.
St. Jude developed therapy to successfully prevent and treat P. carinii pneumonia, saving the lives of countless patients who were cured of cancer but remained at high risk for this usually fatal pneumonia. The therapy also has vital implications for the large number of AIDS patients who are at high risk for this deadly form of pneumonia.
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