Brad Kahl: Involvement with Forward Lymphoma

I became involved in Forward Lymphoma really through my interaction and my relationship with one patient, Ron Skoronski. I met Ron in March of 2007, not long after he was diagnosed with his lymphoma, and he came to see me because I was a lymphoma specialist and he needed a doctor. And when I met Ron you know I looked over his situation and once we knew all the facts about his lymphoma I laid out for him a range of options for what we could do. One of the options that we had for Ron actually was a clinical trial; it's actually a clinical trial that I wrote. But a good trial and an appropriate study for Ron, and Ron opted to participate, so Ron is a subject in that clinical trial right now. Anyway after a few meetings with Ron and getting started on everything and getting his treatment underway he just looked at me in the office and said I'd like to do something for your program, well I had no idea what that meant, here's 50 bucks Brad. Anyway I suggested that Ron talk to the people at the UW Foundation which is the fund raising arm of the University, because fund raising frankly is something I had never been involved in before, I'm a doctor, I take care of patients and I do clinical research, that's what I do. Anyway I got a call a few weeks later from someone with the foundation and they said did you know that Ron is going to donate a million dollars to your program? Wow. That will get your mind racing, and really that's what started the whole thing, because overnight we had to shift into a mode of what's the best way to use this money, what's the best way to impact outcomes for lymphoma patients? And so for the last year that's what we have been thinking about 24/7, what can we do with this money that's going to make the most impact in the fastest way. The Forward Lymphoma effort has just grown in the past year, I think Ron has been able to raise another ½ million roughly for the program and really this whole thing is just getting started. It's almost humbling in a way, you know that he and the people that he has talked too put that much faith in us, I feel a tremendous responsibility to Ron and all the donors to make good use of this money, and we spend a lot of time talking about the best way to use it, designing the research that we're putting the money toward to make sure that it is meaningful research, that it is research that has a potential to have an impact, it's been a challenge but a phenomenal challenge to figure out how to do that, because its new, its all been new to us in the past year, 2 years ago we did not have this good problem. For more information about how to support the UW lymphoma team or just to get more information about our efforts at the University of Wisconsin you can go to www.forwardlymphoma.org.