AbbVie partners with Chicago Cubs to fund cancer research; ‘We aim to create greater awareness for cancer advocacy'
Though there is an emphasis on blood cancers, Andy Souers, AbbVie's vice president heading oncology discovery research, said the scientists are also trying to find treatments that work for ovarian, lung and colorectal cancers, among others.
Working meticulously over sometimes long periods of time, looking at human cells and the molecules within them, Souers said the scientists look for ways to kill the malignant cells to improve a patient's condition.
'We take white cells out of the body to help find ways of curation,' Souers said. 'We look for ways we can just kill the tumor cells.'
As Souers and his colleagues in AbbVie's labs work to find more solutions to treat cancer, the company is increasing its awareness campaign for cancer advocacy, including a partnership with the Chicago Cubs announced Friday, which could put thousands of dollars toward treating cancer.
Dubbed 'Striking Out Cancer,' for every strikeout a Cub pitcher throws during the 2025 home season starting last Friday, AbbVie will donate $233 to Cub Charities, according to an AbbVie press release. The $233 amount is in honor of the 233 Americans diagnosed with cancer every hour.
'Together with our hometown partner, the Chicago Cubs, we aim to create greater awareness for cancer advocacy and to make a remarkable impact for those living with cancer worldwide,' Tracie Haas, AbbVie's senior vice president for corporate affairs, said in the release.
In the Cubs' three games over the weekend. the team's pitchers struck out 18 batters netting nearly $5,000 to fight cancer. With 63 home games left this season, the donation could approach more than $100,000.
While the Cub pitchers are doing their part, AbbVie's scientists continue to look for more ways to snuff out cancerous cells. Other people at the company are doing their part, getting the medicine to the patients who need it.
Lung cancer is a serious concern and receiving a lot of emphasis from AbbVie because, Souers said, it is one of the deadliest. The five-year survival rate is less than 10%, creating an urgency in the lab.
'It's a small cell and that makes it very, very hard,' Souers said. 'Our goal is to dose the patient. Once we have something which works, we go to the next generation of the medicine.'
In the labs, people and machines are working together to test and retest potential medicines until they work. Emily Faivre, a senior principal research scientist working in the labs devoted to finding effective medicine to treat cancer, said the testing is rigorous before the approval process even starts.
Holding a 2½-inch-by-four-inch specimen container with 384 wells — it's like a honeycomb from a beehive — Faivre said each well receives a drop of material for testing through laboratory equipment.
'It reads enzyme activity,' Faivre said. 'The molecules are very small. We need to know how many we need to kill a cancer cell.'
Once the medicine is created and completes the regulatory process, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as well as similar agencies in other countries around the world, Brian Anderson deals with the logistics of getting it to other nations.
Anderson, AbbVie's vice president of product development for science and technology, said the company has established two distinct supply chains. If there is a problem with one, the other can pick up the slack while the issue is resolved. It assures a patient will get their life-saving drug.
'We supply these medicines to 175 countries around the world,' Anderson said. 'We are doing this on a fairly large scale. Thousands of people need this product.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Chicago Tribune
9 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Why many Americans are rethinking alcohol, according to a new Gallup poll
WASHINGTON — Fewer Americans are reporting that they drink alcohol amid a growing belief that even moderate alcohol consumption is a health risk, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday. A record high percentage of U.S. adults, 53%, now say moderate drinking is bad for their health, up from 28% in 2015. The uptick in doubt about alcohol's benefits is largely driven by young adults — the age group that is most likely to believe drinking 'one or two drinks a day' can cause health hazards — but older adults are also now increasingly likely to think moderate drinking carries risks. As concerns about health impacts rise, fewer Americans are reporting that they drink. The survey finds that 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine or beer. That's lower than at any other point in the past three decades. The findings of the poll, which was conducted in July, indicate that after years of many believing that moderate drinking was harmless — or even beneficial — worries about alcohol consumption are taking hold. According to Gallup's data, even those who consume alcohol are drinking less. The federal government is updating new dietary guidelines, including those around alcohol. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, government data showed U.S. alcohol consumption was trending up. But other government surveys have shown a decline in certain types of drinking, particularly among teenagers and young adults. This comes alongside a new drumbeat of information about alcohol's risks. While moderate drinking was once thought to have benefits for heart health, health professionals in recent years have pointed to overwhelming evidence that alcohol consumption leads to negative health outcomes and is a leading cause of cancer. Younger adults have been quicker than older Americans to accept that drinking is harmful, but older adults are coming around to the same view. About two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-olds believe moderate drinking is unhealthy, according to the poll, up from about 4 in 10 in 2015. Older adults are less likely to see alcohol as harmful — about half of Americans age 55 or older believe this — but that's a substantial increase, too. In 2015, only about 2 in 10 adults age 55 or older thought alcohol was bad for their health. In the past, moderate drinking was thought to have some benefits. That idea came from imperfect studies that largely didn't include younger people and couldn't prove cause and effect. Now the scientific consensus has shifted, and several countries recently lowered their alcohol consumption recommendations. Earlier this year, the outgoing U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, recommended a label on bottles of beer, wine and liquor that would clearly outline the link between alcohol consumption and cancer. The federal government's current dietary guidelines recommend Americans not drink or, if they do consume alcohol, men should limit themselves to two drinks a day or fewer while women should stick to one or fewer. Gallup's director of U.S. social research, Lydia Saad, said shifting health advice throughout older Americans' lives may be a reason they have been more gradual than young adults to recognize alcohol as harmful. 'Older folks may be a little more hardened in terms of the whiplash that they get with recommendations,' Saad said. 'It may take them a little longer to absorb or accept the information. Whereas, for young folks, this is the environment that they've grown up in … in many cases, it would be the first thing young adults would have heard as they were coming into adulthood.' The government is expected to release new guidelines later this year, under the directive of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promised big changes. Kennedy has not hinted at how the alcohol recommendations may shift. Slightly more than half of Americans, 54%, report that they drink alcohol — a low in Gallup's data that is especially pronounced among women and young adults. Young Americans' alcohol consumption has been trending downward for years, accelerating the overall decline in alcohol consumption. In sharp contrast with Gallup's findings two decades ago, when young adults were likeliest to report drinking, young adults' drinking rate is now slightly below middle-aged and older adults. Americans' reported drinking is among the lowest since the question was first asked in 1939. For most of the last few decades, at least 6 in 10 Americans have reported drinking alcoholic beverages, only dipping below that point a few times in the question's history. Even if concerns about health risks aren't causing some adults to give up alcohol entirely, these worries could be influencing how often they drink. The survey found that adults who think moderate drinking is bad for one's health are just as likely as people who don't share those concerns to report that they drink, but fewer of the people with health worries had consumed alcohol recently. About half of those who worry moderate drinking is unhealthy said they had a drink in the previous week, compared with about 7 in 10 who did not think drinking was bad for their health. Overall, only about one-quarter of Americans who drink said they had consumed alcohol in the prior 24 hours, a record low in the survey. Roughly 4 in 10 said that it had been more than a week since they had poured a drink.
San Francisco Chronicle
9 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Which choices contribute most to climate change? Most people miss the mark, one study found
It turns out many Americans aren't great at identifying which personal decisions contribute most to climate change. A study recently published by the National Academy of Sciences found that when asked to rank actions, such as swapping a car that uses gasoline for an electric one, carpooling or reducing food waste, participants weren't very accurate when assessing how much those actions contributed to climate change, which is caused mostly by the release of greenhouse gases that happen when fuels like gasoline, oil and coal are burned. "People over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon impact of behaviors much more carbon intensive, like flying or eating meat," said Madalina Vlasceanu, report co-author and professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University. The top three individual actions that help the climate, including avoiding plane flights, choosing not to get a dog and using renewable electricity, were also the three that participants underestimated the most. Meanwhile, the lowest-impact actions were changing to more efficient appliances and swapping out light bulbs, recycling, and using less energy on washing clothes. Those were three of the top four overestimated actions in the report. There are many reasons people get it wrong Vlasceanu said marketing focuses more on recycling and using energy-efficient light bulbs than on why flights or dog adoption are relatively bad for the climate, so participants were more likely to give those actions more weight. How the human brain is wired also plays a role. 'You can see the bottle being recycled. That's visible. Whereas carbon emissions, that's invisible to the human eye. So that's why we don't associate emissions with flying,' said Jiaying Zhao, who teaches psychology and sustainability at the University of British Columbia. Zhao added it's easier to bring actions to mind that we do more often. 'Recycling is an almost daily action, whereas flying is less frequent. It's less discussed,' she said. 'As a result, people give a higher psychological weight to recycling.' Of course, there is also a lot of misleading information. For example, some companies tout the recycling they do while not telling the public about pollution that comes from their overall operations. 'There has been a lot of deliberate confusion out there to support policies that are really out of date," said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit. Why dogs have a big climate impact Dogs are big meat eaters, and meat is a significant contributor to climate change. That is because many of the farm animals, which will become food, release methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Beef is especially impactful, in part because around the world cattle are often raised on land that was illegally deforested. Since trees absorb carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas, cutting them to then raise cattle is a double whammy. 'People just don't associate pets with carbon emissions. That link is not clear in people's minds,' Zhao said. Not all pets are the same, however. Zhao owns a dog and three rabbits. 'I can adopt 100 bunnies that will not be close to the emissions of a dog, because my dog is a carnivore,' she said. The owner of a meat-eating pet can lower their impact by looking for food made from sources other than beef. Zhao, for example, tries to minimize her dog's carbon footprint by feeding her less carbon-intensive protein sources, including seafood and turkey. Pollution from air travel Planes emit a lot of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, also greenhouse gases. Additionally, planes emit contrails, or vapor trails that prevent planet-warming gases from escaping into space. A round-trip economy-class flight on a 737 from New York to Los Angeles produces more than 1,300 pounds of emissions per passenger, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency. Skipping that single flight saves about as much carbon as swearing off eating all types of meat a year, or living without a car for more than three months, according to U.N. estimates. Other decisions, both impactful and minor Switching to energy that comes from renewable sources, such as solar and wind, has a large positive impact because such sources don't emit greenhouse gases. Some of the biggest climate decisions individuals can make include how they heat and cool their homes and the types of transportation they use. Switching to renewable energy minimizes the impact of both. Recycling is effective at reducing waste headed for landfill, but its climate impact is relatively small because transporting, processing and repurposing recyclables typically relies on fossil fuels. Plus, less than 10% of plastics actually get recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Other decisions with overestimated impact, including washing clothes in cold water and switching to more efficient light bulbs, are relatively less important. That is because those appliances have a relatively small impact compared to other things, such plane flights and dogs, so improving on them, while beneficial, has a much more limited influence. Experts say the best way to combat the human tendency to miscalculate climate-related decisions is with more readily available information. Zhao said that people are already more accurate in their estimations than they would have been 10 or 20 years ago because it's easier to learn. The study backs up that hypothesis. After participants finished ranking actions, the researchers corrected their mistakes, and they changed which actions they said they'd take to help the planet. 'People do learn from these interventions,' Vlasceanu said. 'After learning, they are more willing to commit to actually more impactful actions.' ___
USA Today
9 minutes ago
- USA Today
The Daily Money: A housing match made in heaven
Good morning! It's Daniel de Visé with your Daily Money. When Cristiana Perez and Nick Porter began house-hunting in New York State in 2021, they were open-minded about their prospects, but they kept getting priced out. Finally, they had an epiphany. Four years later, the couple are the proud owners of a former church. As church attendance declines and the housing market gets tighter, Perez and Porter's path may hold promise. The wealthiest suburbs of America's biggest cities New York's wealthiest suburb is Scarsdale, a name long linked to affluence. Wellesley, the most well-heeled Boston suburb, is known for academia. Fewer Americans might recognize the name of Hinsdale, Chicago's wealthiest suburb. And some non-Texans might struggle to differentiate between University Park and West University Place, the most affluent suburbs, respectively, of metropolitan Dallas and Houston. Here are the wealthiest suburbs of America's largest cities. 📰 More stories you shouldn't miss 📰 📰 A great read 📰 Finally, here's a popular story from earlier this year that you may have missed. Read it! Share it! Americans currently owe roughly $1.8 trillion in student loan debt. Yet, despite rising costs, going to college is a decision that can give you a high return on your investment. The size of that return, however, can depend on your major. About The Daily Money Each weekday, The Daily Money delivers the best consumer and financial news from USA TODAY, breaking down complex events, providing the TLDR version, and explaining how everything from Fed rate changes to bankruptcies impacts you. Daniel de Visé covers personal finance for USA Today.
