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Avenue Magazine,
September, 2005
By Nicole Pezold
Mary Ann Tighe and David
Hidalgo Raise Money to Research
the Forgotten Cancer
In winter 2000, Joan Scarangello, a senior
news writer at NBC, went to see her internist about
a cough she couldn’t shake. A chest x-ray showed
nothing, and she went away with a regimen of antibiotics.
When, six months later, the cough continued to plague
the otherwise healthy 47-year-old, her doctor ordered
a CT scan. “Not only did Joan have lung cancer,”
remembers her older sister Mary Ann Tighe, an accomplished
deal-maker in New York’s commercial real estate
market, “she had stage four lung cancer –
it was a thunderbolt. And Joan never smoked!”
With the help of Tighe’s husband Dr. David Hidalgo,
former chief of reconstructive surgery at the Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Scarangello quickly called
on the leading thoracic oncologists for care. But little
could be done. In 2001, Joan died – exactly 20
years after her own mother, also a non-smoker, succumbed
to lung cancer. “Here’s what was really
heartbreaking,” says Tighe, “the doctors
knew not one more thing than they did in 1981.”
While steady breakthroughs over the last
couple of decades have transformed many cancers such
as breast, colon and prostate into treatable –
and, if caught early enough, beatable – diseases,
a black cloud still obscures lung cancer treatment.
This is the case even though it is far more deadly and
widespread. An estimated 173,770 people were diagnosed
with lung cancer in 2004, and more Americans –
and a disproportionate number of women – will
die from the disease this year than from breast, prostate
and colon cancers combined. Lung cancer treatment typically
involves surgery to remove the growth, followed by chemotherapy
in some cases. But such measures have proven largely
ineffective, and four out of five patients die within
12 months of being diagnosed.
The problem, as Scarangello’s family
discovered too late, is that very little money goes
toward lung cancer research. In 2004, the American Cancer
Society spent an estimated $130 million on research
– but only $12 million on lung cancer, versus
$29 million on breast cancer. Measured in morbidity,
the funding divide is more alarming. In 2003, the federal
government spent $14,045 per breast cancer death and
$10,761 per prostate cancer death on research. For each
lung cancer death, a mere $1,632 went toward research.
To ensure that Joan’s life and untimely
death not be in vain, Tighe and Hidalgo created the
Joan Scarangello Foundation to Conquer Lung Cancer,
also known as Joan’s Legacy. “Joan was a
person of enormous energy,” says Tighe of her
sister, a lifelong New Yorker and untiring reader and
writer who worked with a roster of top news anchors
– Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams
among them – before being struck by non-small
cell lung cancer. In the first three years of its ambitious
quest, the foundation has awarded more than $1 million
in research grants, largely due to the loving labor
of this husband-and-wife team who serve on a board stacked
with others who knew and loved Joan.
The foundation’s strategy is to
test daring approaches to uncovering the roots of –
and a cure for – the disease, and to cultivate
a whole new crop of lung cancer researchers in the process.
“It’s not just that there isn’t the
money for research,” explains Tighe, “doctors
can’t attract new talent because they aren’t
given the tools to heal the disease.” To correct
this, Joan’s Legacy acts much like a venture capital
fund, providing initial support to spark larger future
investments in the search for a cure. “We’re
casting a wide net across the country and internationally,”
says Hidalgo, who heads the foundation’s medical
committee and runs a prominent Park Avenue cosmetic
surgery practice. “We’re looking for researchers
with new ideas about how to approach the problem.”
To honor Joan’s creative legacy
as a journalist, the foundation created the Joanie,
an award annually given to a broadcast or print journalist
whose quality coverage is helping to raise awareness
of this quick killer. Public perception remains an enormous
obstacle to defeating lung cancer. “Why does society
not want to fund lung cancer research?” asks Dr.
Mark G. Kris, chief thoracic oncologist at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering and a member of the medical committee
at Joan’s Legacy. “Part of it is people
very wrongly blame the victims. They believe people
make a choice to smoke cigarettes.” In reality,
the majority of lung cancer patients – 77 percent
– identify themselves as non-smokers. Either they
stopped years ago – as in about half of newly
diagnosed cases – or, like Joan, never smoked.
“Smoking is irrelevant,” says Kris. “When
someone has HIV you don’t ask them how they got
it. You treat them.”
The government, both at the local and
national levels, has shrunk from the challenge. Despite
governors’ unanimous vow to spend a large portion
of the $246 billion in tobacco settlements that will
be divvied among states over the next couples of decades,
no money is set for lung cancer research, and a paltry
0.65 percent is earmarked for federal research on tobacco
use or substance abuse. Few on Capitol Hill have championed
the cause, either. “Many people fear that the
tobacco companies are somehow involved and don’t
want to risk incurring their wrath or loss of funding,”
says Kris.
The foundation has just begun to see results
from the first projects it funded years ago. “The
most promising findings are in the field of unraveling
the cancer genome and finding the genetic causes of
lung cancer,” says Hidalgo, who, although not
a trained thoracic oncologist, has closely followed
developments in the field. But to move such research
to the next level will ultimately cost billions of dollars,
estimates Kris, and can only really be accomplished
at a national level.
Tighe and Hidalgo remain optimistic in
their search for Joan’s Legacy. “Dying from
lung cancer is not inevitable,” insists Hidalgo.
“It’s a disease and it’s beatable.
But it can’t be done without research.”
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