The Edmée Firth Fund for Research in Ovarian Cancer (EFFROC) has two main areas of focus: early detection and targeted second-line treatments. It also funds translational research studies, the minimization of toxicity for maintenance treatments, adverse treatment side effects, and raising awareness of risk factors among both the general public and the medical community.
Because of the current lack of a screening method to detect ovarian cancer at an early stage, EFFROC is funding the development of clinical testing methods (screening, biomarkers, etc.) EFFROC will also fund education to increase physicians’ awareness of the disease, and emphasize the critical importance of early detection.
Unfortunately, recurrence is common with ovarian cancer. EFFROC-funded research will focus on ways to reduce toxicity and side effects of second-line treatment, as well as to improve such treatment through the discovery of new drugs and combination therapies.
EFFROC will fund translational research studies (translational research takes the findings of basic science research and “translates” them into practical medical advances) to identify new and more effective ways to detect, diagnose, and treat ovarian cancer.
Personalized medicine, targeted therapies, and the minimization of toxicity for maintenance treatments are all goals of EFFROC-funded research.
EFFROC funding will help address adverse events, toxicity, and treatment side effects, both hematologic and non-hematologic.
Improving awareness among doctors and women alike about risk factors saves lives. EFFROC will spearhead initiatives geared towards ensuring this information is widely disseminated.
Edmée Firth, a multilingual leader in the Arts and Foundation worlds, died in 2021 after a five-year battle with ovarian cancer. Her husband of 31 years, Nicholas, founded EFFROC to raise funding for research, starting with a $1 million stake. The goal is to increase that number significantly over time through public and private means.
Edmée headed the American effort to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. She was also Executive Director of the Musician’s Emergency Fund and served on many Boards, including the MacDowell Colony, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the New York City Opera, and the Brookdale Center on Aging, as well as the New York Council for Weill Cornell Medicine. As Executive Director of the Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, she made transformative grants for Aging, Arts, Education, and Social Services.
Read about some of the groundbreaking projects EFFROC is funding.
Daniel Heller, PhD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
2023 Collaborative Research Development Grant
Dr. Heller and his team are seeking to enable earlier, more accurate screening for ovarian cancer diagnosis by developing and creating a sensor platform that can detect a “disease fingerprint.” The team is building sensor arrays comprising modified carbon nanotubes (called organic color centers, OCCs). In preliminary experiments, the team found that a library of their nanosensors, using machine learning algorithms, reliably identified late-stage ovarian cancer significantly better than the established, FDA-approved methods. If successful, this sensor technology could potentially lower the rate of ovarian cancer patient deaths. This grant was funded as part of OCRA’s partnership with Microsoft AI for Health.
Kristopher Sarosiek, PhD, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
2023 Collaborative Research Development Grant
Dr. Sarosiek and his team are working on using new medicines to improve treatment outcomes for patients with ovarian cancers. Currently, existing therapies like carboplatin and paclitaxel are highly effective at inducing cancer cell death, but most patients become resistant to these therapies. Recently, medicines have been developed to enhance the ability of standard chemotherapies to activate tumor cell death — potentially providing an opportunity to increase cure rates in many cancers, including ovarian. By combining standard therapies with cell death-promoting BH3 mimetics — medicines that inhibit pro-survival proteins that keep cancer cells alive — clinicians may be able to extend remissions or increase cure rates by delaying or preventing the development of treatment resistance in tumor cells. BH3 mimetics have already been approved by the FDA for use in some cancers, with positive results observed even in patients treated previously by multiple other therapies.
Sohrab Shah, PhD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
2022 Collaborative Research Development Grant
Project completed in December 2024
Dr. Shah’s team aims to analyze data created in the course of routine clinical care, such as histopathological (H&E) slides of tumor tissue, computed tomography (CT) scans, and clinical information, to improve the prediction of patient outcomes. Since each data type measures the properties of a tumor at very different scales (from the tissue-level CT scan to the cell-level H&E slide and the molecular-level genome sequences), they each contain unique information. To optimize this complementary content, Dr. Shah and his team will design an AI-centered approach that integrates the different data modalities into a unified model that will enable more accurate stratification of patients into risk groups that are informative for therapy. He anticipates that improved patient stratification will lay the groundwork for identifying which patients are best suited to chemo and immune therapeutic strategies, and which may benefit from more investigative, new treatments. Upon completion of the work, the team will make all de-identified data and AI models publicly available, dramatically increasing the amount of AI-ready data in the public domain and likely prompting more research that ultimately will advance collective knowledge of ovarian cancer and potentially improve patient outcomes.
We Believe There’s a Better Way to Do Research So we created it. OCRA has launched the most ambitious initiative in our history. We believe it represents a fundamentally new way for research to work—one with the potential to accelerate discovery in gynecologic cancers while serving as a model for breakthroughs across all diseases. We … Continued
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