Fill The Gaps In Lung Cancer

Please take a few minutes to read this — it explains why we're changing our model to generate revenue.

Fill the Gaps started because of my wife, Sheila. Almost nine years ago she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. She's still with me today — working and playing golf every weekend. We decided her story needed to be shared, to show other cancer patients what's possible.

Fighting lung cancer effectively requires two things:

1. An oncologist who understands biomarker/gene mutation testing and knows the clinical trial landscape.

2. Either living near a clinical trial site, or having the funds to travel to one.

That second piece is where FTG comes in. Our goal has been to raise funding to cover cancer patients' travel to clinical trials.

While researching clinical trials, I found some striking facts. Only a small fraction of cancer patients ever participates in a trial — largely because they can't afford to travel, they aren't aware of the benefits, or they were never tested for the gene mutations that would make them eligible.

The downstream cost of this is enormous, and it's why we're moving toward a for-profit model. Low enrollment means most trials run past their deadlines — by an average of 12 to 18 months. Every day of delay costs $33,000 to $50,000 in trial operating costs. If the drug goes on to win FDA approval, pharma also loses roughly $800,000 per day in delayed market entry, over a delay that can run one to three years.

I believe big pharma will support us once they see we can save them millions per trial. That's the case for taking Fill the Gaps from nonprofit to for-profit.

We have a verbal agreement to run a proof of concept with Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. Our goals for the POC:

- Determine how many travel-assisted patients we can enroll in an MSK clinical trial.

- Show that travel-assisted patients let a trial complete in fewer days than the expected timeline.

- Build an ROI model comparing travel costs against total cost savings from reduced trial days.

This POC is critical — it will give us the data we need to bring pharma dollars in. Is it easy? No. Is it necessary? Absolutely.

Thomas Howard

Executive Director, FTG

[email protected]

424-254-4885