The T Cell Trainers includes members of the Bleakley Lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as well as friends, family and community partners. Throughout the month of September 2018, we will be walking, running and biking to raise awareness of our research and funds to support our efforts to develop new immune-boosting treatments for infants with leukemia. You can help by joining our team, moving & fundraising with us, or by donating to a team member. 100% of all funds will go directly to the research.

Today, survival in infants (<12 months old) diagnosed with leukemia is much worse than in older children also diagnosed with leukemia. Almost 5% of infants die within just a month of diagnosis and half of those who go into remission relapse within the first year. Babies are also especially sensitive to the toxicities of current therapies. Safer and more effective therapies are urgently needed, such as immunotherapies that empower a patient’s immune system to zero in on specific abnormalities to selectively kill leukemia cells. The Bleakley team is in the early phases of developing such therapies to safely help babies fight their cancer, by training immune T cells to target abnormal leukemia-specific proteins. This is a new and important direction. We need your help to launch the project and generate the critical data necessary to obtain large grant funding. We appreciate those of you who help us raise money for this project last year. Between then and now, we took our first baby steps and found two potential targets for infant leukemia immunotherapy. This year's fundraising will help us to find more targets. More targets will help us develop therapies that will help as many babies as possible!

We thank everyone who helped the T Cell Trainers in the past. Thanks to you, we completed development of a brand new T cell immunotherapy for leukemia, which targets a molecule called HA-1. This summer, we treated the first patient with our new HA-1 immunotherapy!  This is a very exciting step for our research team and we thank you sincerely for helping us to take it. We hope the new immunotherapy benefits many more patients.

Now, you can help support the development of a T cell immunotherapy for infants with leukemia in two ways:

a)    Join our team: You can commit to walking, running, biking, dancing, swimming or otherwise moving with purpose, throughout September, and logging your miles on the ALSF T Cell Trainers website. You can participate wherever you live and whenever you like. Just record your miles under your name on the website. It would be great if you also ask your friends and associates to sponsor your efforts, and/or join our team. For example, you could set a goal of moving 500 miles, and raising $1 per mile. There are no minimum miles or dollars required. Every step toward a new treatment counts.

b)    Sponsor a team member: If you don’t have the time or inclination to join as a team member, you can support a team member. Just donate whatever you can in the name of a participating team member. Again, 100% of the funds go directly to the research.

Challenge: Alex’s Million Mile Challenge aims to log 1 million miles in September. T Cell Trainers would like to contribute 25,000 miles—that’s an average of 250 miles for each of 100 participants. Last year our highest performing team members moved 500 miles during September. Can you do better than that to help us to help babies beat leukemia?