The CURE Media Group, a multimedia platform devoted to cancer updates and research that reaches more than 1 million patients, recently announced four recipients of the inaugural 2020 Lung Cancer Heroes awards and the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement award.
The 2020 Lung Cancer Heroes are:
Carolyn Baggett, RN, lung cancer screening program coordinator at Baptist MD Anderson Cancer Center, Jacksonville, Florida. Ms. Baggett developed a program to help find lung cancer at an early stage. As of July 2020, Baptist MD Anderson Cancer Center has completed almost 10,000 screenings at 10 locations and found 129 lung cancers, of which almost 70% were early stage.
Jennifer L. Garst, MD, Professor of Medicine and Thoracic Medical Oncology at Duke Cancer Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the founder and current Board Chair of the Lung Cancer Initiative of North Carolina and was the Founding Chair of the Lung Cancer Initiative Scientific Advisory Committee.
Fred R. Hirsch, MD, PhD, Executive Director of the Center for Thoracic Oncology in The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai and the Richard Stein, Joe Lowe, and Louis Price Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. For more than 25 years, Dr. Hirsch has helped identify and validate prognostic markers for lung cancer outcomes and biomarkers for personalized lung cancer therapies.
Deborah Pickworth was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2013, when she was 43, and has undergone several treatments and surgical procedures over the past 7 years. In 2014, she started Team Pickworth for the annual LUNG FORCE Walk in Detroit, and she has raised more than $17,300 over the past 6 years.
The recipient of the Lifetime Achievement award is:
Bonnie J. Addario, lung cancer survivor, co-founder and Board Chair of GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer. As an activist, advocate, and educator, Ms. Addario has empowered patients and given them a voice since she received a stage IIIb lung cancer diagnosis more than a decade ago. She and her family founded the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation in 2006, which merged with the Lung Cancer Alliance to form GO2 Foundation.
