Harvard-trained immunologist and mother of two Emily Venanzi received a shocking diagnosis during Thanksgiving week of 2017—she had metastatic lung cancer.
Thanks to the previous decade of research in the field, Venanzi was able to receive a targeted drug therapy that has kept her cancer in-check.
Venanzi is now working to advance the next decade of lung cancer research, donating resources, time, and effort to build a ‘dream team’ of lung cancer researchers urgently focused on bringing novel immunotherapies and other treatments to patients.
It’s just a cough, Emily Venanzi thought. And maybe some heartburn. But the day before Thanksgiving in 2017, Venanzi found out it wasn’t a cough; it was metastatic lung cancer. The mother of two, a nine-year-old daughter and six-year-old son at the time, Venanzi wasn’t sure how to share the news with them. Silently, she braced herself for the onslaught of harsh chemotherapy and pain.
But a week later, Venanzi learned that the cells of her lung cancer contained a mutation in a gene called ALK. And thanks to research done over the previous decade, there were targeted drug therapies immediately available for her cancer. Venanzi joined a clinical trial combining two of those therapies—and felt better within days. Her fears of suffering and death lifted. Taking a combination of two oral pills regularly, “I lead a pretty normal life,” Venanzi says.
A normal life that now includes advocating for lung cancer research. Trained in immunology at Harvard, Venanzi pored through the scientific literature to learn about her cancer. She came away with an unsettling understanding: lung cancer research is sorely underfunded compared to other cancers.
Today, Venanzi works with lung cancer nonprofits to move ALK research forward in biotech and academic labs. There is no time to waste, “In almost everyone with ALK+ lung cancer, the cancer will start growing again eventually, and I’m hoping we’ll try to start solving that problem,” says Venanzi.
Through a fellow ALK+ lung cancer patient, Venanzi and her husband, Patrick, heard about Break Through Cancer, a research foundation that aims to intercept and cure some of the deadliest cancers for which little progress has been made. Break Through Cancer had the infrastructure they had been looking for to build cross-institutional teams, says Patrick. “This really is the dream team of lung cancer researchers,” he adds. “We couldn’t be more excited about it.”
Venanzi and Patrick are now part of the funding team working to build the PoweRD 2 Cure ALK+ Lung Cancer TeamLab, which will bring together leading experts in lung cancer to pursue a shared vision of urgently delivering impact for patients. The novel aspect of the team’s strategy is to understand and overcome Minimal Residual Disease, the ‘seed’ of cancer that often remains after initial treatment and eventually manifests as resistant and terminal cancer.
“The amount of progress made in the 10 to 15 years before I was diagnosed was so important, and now we need to keep things moving at that pace or faster,” says Venanzi. “With more research, very tough questions are close to being answered.”