A Scottsdale philanthropist has donated $50,000 to the Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research Institute and the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich., to begin a study on a rare form of ovarian cancer.
Foster Friess, the founder of Brandywine Funds and who has homes in Scottsdale and Jackson, Wyo., has previously given $300,000 for ovarian cancer research. his latest donation is in memory of Taryn Ritchey, the daughter of his personal assistant, Jody Jost of Cave Creek.
Ritchey, 22, died in 2007 of small-cell carcinoma of the ovary. the cancer strikes fewer than 250 women per year.
“Taryn’s dying wish was to be able to help other young women so they won’t have to go through what she went through,” Jost said in a statement.
Tom Benford of Peoria plans to donate to the project a portion of the proceeds from sales of his new book, “Standing Tall,” inspired by his daughter, Andrea Benford Theis, 31, who died of SCCO in 2006.
TGen’s head of breast and ovarian cancer research, Dr. Heather Cunliffe, said SCCO has been tagged a silent killer because the symptoms, such as abdominal pain and nausea, are vague and easily misdiagnosed.
Also, doctors may consider ovarian cancer as a possible cause of such symptoms in women who have completed menopause because that’s when most ovarian cancers typically strike, she said.
But SCCO is unusual in that it emerges in much younger victims; the average age of diagnosis is 24. This means doctors are less likely to consider ovarian cancer as a cause until it has spread.
Even if doctors do catch it in its early stage, SCCO is resistant to chemotherapy and fast-spreading, Cunliffe said.
“Almost all patients die within one to two years,” she said.
Cunliffe said she has been wanting to study SCCO to identify a potential genetic commonality in tumors that could lead researchers to create a successful treatment.
“I was contacted by the loved ones of women who have been lost to SCCO to ask if there is anyone anywhere doing any research on SCCO,” she said. “The answer is: no.”
To obtain samples of tumors from SCOO victims and patients who have been recently diagnosed, TGen and VARI researchers created a secure website, tgen.org/scco, where families or patients can download forms to take to physicians to fill out so they may produce a tumor tissue sample and ship it to the institutes’ labs.
Cunliffe said researchers do not know the women’s identities. Tissue samples are assigned a number.
Cunliffe is the principal investigator. she is working with researchers Dr. Brian Haab, head of VARI’s Laboratory of Cancer Immunodiagnostics; Dr. Kyle Furge, head of VARI’s Laboratory of Computational Biology; and Dr. Jeffrey Trent, president and research director of both TGen and VARI, who also leads an active cancer research laboratory.