Every day, children battling cancer travel thousands of miles for treatments. That’s why this September, Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, we’re going the distance – running, walking or biking – a million miles to raise awareness and fundraise for cures.

This is an exciting program created by Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF), which evolved from a young cancer patient’s desire to help others. Diagnosed with neuroblastoma before her first birthday, 4-year-old Alex opened a lemonade stand, raising money to help find a cure for all children with cancer. When 8 year-old Alex passed away, she had helped raise more than $1 million. ALSF was founded in her honor and has become a national fundraising movement, carrying on her legacy of hope.

ALSF funds critically-needed research to find better treatments and cures for children with cancer. They’ve raised more than $100 million since 2005, funding 500 childhood cancer research projects at 102 top hospitals and institutions in the US and Canada.

Dr. Marie Bleakley is one of those stellar researchers, a pediatric oncologist and stem cell transplantation expert. She takes care of young cancer patients and performs cutting-edge research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where she and other world-class scientists are working to better understand and eliminate cancers and other life-threatening diseases.

Dr. Bleakley is working to save the lives of young patients whose leukemia relapses after conventional transplant approaches and then have few if any curative options. ALSF funding is supporting her clinical trial of a truly innovative approach, using powerful, genetically engineered T cells to attack the leukemias. If the trial is successful, it will advance a new way to treat and prevent relapse and also help develop other types of immunotherapy, including vaccines, to save even more lives.

This year, Dr. Bleakley, her research team, her family and friends (The T cell Trainers) are Million Mile participants. Every dollar they raise will go straight to funding cancer research for kids, including the new clinical trial for leukemia. T cell Trainers need your help, your steps and your dollars, to make the most of this amazing opportunity.