Building A Bridge of Love: All Heart

by | Feb 12, 2016 | Rally Blog

This Valentine’s weekend will be filled with hearts and love. We just want to say that we love our supporters, love our researchers and of course, love our Rally Kids. In honor of all this love we want to highlight Rally Researcher, Dr. Saro Armenian, who cares deeply about protecting cancer kids’ hearts from chemotherapy.

Heart disease is one of the biggest life threatening side effects from chemotherapy. Dr. Armenian had the idea of protecting the heart with a low dose blood pressure pill while receiving chemotherapy. It was an outside the box idea and Rally was willing to take a chance on it.

Research takes years and years to develop. Rally began funding Dr. Armenian in 2012 as a Young Investigator. In 2013 Dr. Armenian reached out to Rally because he had run out of funding and needed $100,000 bridge gap to get him to the next level. Most of the grant was used to get the drug and the placebo manufactured. Without these, his critical research of how to protect kids’ hearts from chemotherapy could not continue.

After having his request peer reviewed, Rally gladly gave him the $100,000 grant. Whew—crisis averted!

Last year we were thrilled when Dr. Armenain reached out to let us know that he had received a five-year grant from the National Institute of Health to begin a clinical trial. To date more than 30 children’s hospitals are participating in this trial.

Dr. Armenian says, “The research funds provided by Rally were critical to the development of the study drug for our patients. Without this step, it would have been very difficult to secure the necessary support from the NIH/NCI to conduct the clinical trial.”

So on this Valentine’s weekend we want to thank you our donors for having such a big heart, that Rally was able to provide the critical bridge gap funding. And we want to thank Dr. Armenian for thinking outside the box and protecting the most precious of hearts—the hearts of our children.

This Valentine’s weekend we want to say thank you for helping us build a bridge of love for protecting kids hearts.

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