Qualtrics and Huntsman Cancer Institute ally in quest to end cancer.

• Author: Christensen, Lisa
• Position: Around Utah

Salt Lake City -- The fight against cancer just got a new ally--QUALTRICS and a new community-driven initiative to raise funds for the HUNTSMAN CANCER INSTITUTE.

Ryan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, announced the Five for the Fight initiative at the Qualtrics Insight Summit in February. The campaign asks people to donate $5 toward cancer research in the name of someone they know who has battled with cancer, then invite five friends to do the same.

Dr. Mario Cappechl, a Nobel prize-winning cancer researcher with the Huntsman institute, says the state of cancer research has improved by leaps and bounds since the start of his career. "We're making progress," he says. "First, we need to understand what this disease is and how it progresses, and once you have that understanding, you can work on therapy."

Tracing the disease is made even trickier by the fact that the many ailments that fall under the "cancer" diagnosis share certain similarities but can behave in vastly different ways and have different causes. "Each one is different; each one has its secrets. We have to break them and develop treatments for each," says Cappechi. "We have to study each one individually."

Dr. Joshua Schiffmann, a pediatric oncologist whose work on the link between elephant genetics and cancer prevention has made headlines over the last several months, says because of the way the cancer prevention gene, dubbed P53, works in humans, odds are about half of the population will get cancer at some point. Elephants have 40 copies of that gene, versus the two found in humans, says Schiffmann, and elephants have...