Membership in the Corporate Council of The Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation (SWCRF) International Institute Without Walls is open to corporations who support the Foundation’s work on a global basis and who pledge sustaining support to increase the number of highly collaborative basic, translational and clinical research groups throughout the United States, Canada, China, Israel and Europe.

Corporations are invited to join SWCRF's International Institute Without Walls by pledging an annual membership fee of $10,000. This provides for full global membership inside and outside of the United States. In this way, a company can be identified with internationally recognized cancer researchers and the fifty leading scientists who collaborate on a global scale to find a cure for cancer; its membership pledge provides sustaining support for the Foundation’s mission, that allocates 87% of its funds directly to researchers, and helps guarantee that our work essential for the public health will not only continue, but flourish.

Corporate Members receive ready access to timely information regarding all the scientific endeavors of the Foundation through complimentary subscriptions to the Foundation’s progress reports derived directly from the scientists we fund. Innovative clinical trials in several different forms of cancer, including blood malignancies, lung, liver, and breast cancer and melanoma, are based on discoveries funded by SWCRF.

SWCRF was created in 1976 to support cancer research, dedicated to the development of targeted cancer cell-specific therapies with minimal toxicity. Its main approach from the start, differentiation therapy, is based on correcting defects of abnormal differentiation found in cancers, and restoring normal cellular differentiation with agents that cause cancer cells to mature, no longer to divide and die. This has already proven successful in treating acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) and the Foundation’s scientists played a leading role in this important work that lead to the FDA approval of all-trans-retinoic acid for the treatment of this leukemia. Building on the success of APL therapy the Foundation’s scientists and others went on to help establish the value of arsenic trioxide treatment for APL. A variety of patents has been submitted or awarded for these endeavors. The Corporate Council is the channel that marshals creative forces to bind physicians, scientists, and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries to help capitalize on intellectual property and accomplishments of these distinguished scientists (some of our prominent grantees are listed below).

• Dr. David Baltimore, California Institute of Technology
• Dr. Stephen Baylin, Johns Hopkins University
• Dr. Benjamin Neel, Beth Israel Hospital/Harvard University
• Dr. Neal Rosen, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
• Dr. Charles Sawyers, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
• Dr. Owen Witte, University of California Los Angeles

For 30 years, SWCRF has been instrumental in developing new drugs to successfully treat cancer, and has supported and trained more than 160 scientists by awarding over $55 million in grants. By 2010, we plan to grow substantially by funding 100 translational scientists worldwide. SWCRF is focused on two main goals moving forward: 1) develop pioneering treatment regimens using innovative tools including unique transgenic animal models that mimic human malignancy and pre-malignancy to study how anti-cancer agents work in the laboratory before rapidly translating our discoveries into the clinic. Indeed, we are already using transgenic models to target some of the most common and deadly cancers, such as prostate and lung cancer; and 2) moving basic discoveries in the stem cell field into the clinic.