Catholic Vitamin S: Sponsorship Blog

This lovely lady is Kim Lehman. She is Director of Give Cures, the campaign for the John Paul II Medical Research Institute in Des Moines, Iowa. 

I talked with some friends in Iowa and they told me that Kim is widely known for her pro-life work, especially when she previously served as the Director of IOWA RIGHT TO LIFE.

You can reach out with any questions or interest to Kim or any of the medical research staff at givecures.org  The best email address to reach them is found at givecures@givecures.org

From the Give Cures website, we include this information

Did you know that you have stem cells in all different parts of your body? Stem cells regenerate damaged tissue. They are one of the tools your body uses to fix problems. Now stem cells can be taken from a newborns cord blood to create heart tissue that can be transplanted on a patient with heart disease to treat a damaged heart. It keeps getting better.

When patients learn for the first time that they have been diagnosed with cancer, they are universally fearful of the diagnosis and the chemotherapy regimen that is recommended by their physician. They want to know whether the chemotherapy is going to cure their cancer because they are aware that chemotherapy carries several adverse side effects.  According to national cancer statistics, only one-third of cancer patients are achieving cures with chemotherapy. When cancer relapses or metastasizes despite being subjected to chemotherapy, patients are usually subjected to another round of different chemotherapeutic drug when their bodies are already compromised to tolerate a second round of chemotherapy. There is now growing medical evidence to support that cancer relapses, fails to respond to therapy or metastasizes because there are cancer stem cells that are more resistant to chemotherapy. Stem cells also have the potential to be cancerous, which leads to a worse prognosis. At present cancer stem cells are not routinely detected, isolated or tested for their susceptibility to chemotherapy. Having this technical ability would greatly advance the cancer field. The John Paul II Medical Research Institute is uniquely positioned to address this very need.

The long-term outlook for the United States in developing new therapies and cures for patients afflicted with the medical conditions stated above is precarious. Over 26 billion dollars a year is spent on chemotherapy and only a third of cancer patients achieve cures. Current medical therapies only control symptoms and limit progression of the disease and do not generally accomplish cures. Furthermore, our current therapies do not repair or regenerate diseased organs. In contrast, adult stem cells have the potential of providing valuable regenerative new therapies. Research and drug discovery has been additionally hindered by the pharmaceutical industry, which has shed over 90,000 jobs recently due to the economic climate. Additionally, many academic centers have seen shrinking numbers of physician-scientists who care for patients and understand their patients medical needs and their disease processes. This is largely attributed to decreasing funding streams from state and federal research grants. Consequently, it has fallen upon cash strapped small biotechnology companies to develop over two-thirds of the new drugs that are entering today’s clinical trials.

With the support of private donations, the Institute plans to isolate and grow cancer or other genetic diseased stem cells from patient biopsies or surgical specimens to offer personalized and more effective therapy for patients. For more information on this program and to learn how to donate to our Institute and help us accomplish our mission click here. Thank you for your support.

NOTES AND MUSIC FOR THIS SHOW

We thank our friend Bryan Murdaugh for his many contributions to Catholic Vitamins. Bryan is an evangelist, a motivational speaker, a musician and a singer. We nominate him for the Top Ten Tech-Weenie Award – he’s been very helpful in keeping our website going. We played his song GLORY from his album 29.

At the end of the show, we played BLESSED HOPE – a great Advent song by the Glenn Mohr choir. We thank them for giving us permission to play this a couple years ago.

Finally – we were happy to support the daughter of Marianna Bartholomew – she’s a budding artist and trying to raise money for an art scholarship. The ‘commercial’ we played for their haiku cups points to this web address:

Haiku Cups

 

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