The Safeway Foundation Funds Two New Innovative Breast Cancer Research Projects

Safeway Inc. and The Safeway Foundation are conducting their annual chain-wide October Breast Cancer Awareness fundraising initiative. Funds used from past campaigns helped to create two new research projects that could change the face of cancer clinical trials and bring new treatments to patients quicker, more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

The first project, the I-SPY TRIAL (Investigation of Serial Studies to
Predict Your Therapeutic Response with Imaging And moLecular Analysis) is managed by the Biomarkers Consortium in conjunction with the National Cancer Institute. The Consortium is a unique public-private partnership led by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health that includes the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a large number of partners from major pharmaceutical companies, leading academic medical centers, non-profit and patient advocacy groups. Scientists from NCI, FDA, and major cancer research centers helped develop and will participate in the conduct of the trial. In the course of the trial, women with locally advanced breast cancer will be given promising drugs in development that are individually targeted to the biology of each woman’s tumor. Researchers will use data from one set of patients’ treatment to treat other patients, and thus more quickly eliminate ineffective treatments and drugs. In addition, the I-SPY trial will test the concept of personalized medicine by leveraging the molecular tools that have been developed over the last decade with the potential to identify and test new biomarkers as well.

The second Safeway Foundation-funded research initiative comes from the University of California, which is launching an unprecedented statewide collaboration for breast cancer patients with the goal of revolutionizing the course of their care by designing and testing new approaches to research, technology and health care delivery. The project, the ATHENA Breast Health Network, will initially involve 150,000 women throughout California who will be screened for breast cancer and followed for years to come through the five UC medical centers. The Safeway Foundation provided a $4.8 million grant, which will be coupled with a $5.3 million grant from the University of California.

Since 2001, The Safeway Foundation has donated nearly $60 million for breast cancer.