>>Back

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, located in Memphis, Tennessee, is one of the world's premier centers for research and treatment of catastrophic diseases in children, primarily pediatric cancers.

Mission
The mission of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is to advance cures and means of prevention for pediatric catastrophic diseases. Consistent with the vision of our founder Danny Thomas, no child is denied treatment based on race or religion, and no family ever pays St. Jude for anything.

Patients
About 7,500 patients were seen last year at St. Jude, hailing from every state in the U.S., Latin America and throughout the world.

Most patients are treated on a continuing outpatient basis, but the hospital also maintains 78 beds for patients requiring hospitalization during treatment. Each patient is admitted to St. Jude upon obtaining physician referral, once there is a diagnosis or suspicion that the patient has a disease being researched at St. Jude.

Our commitment to helping children throughout the world is accomplished thanks to the generous financial support St. Jude receives each year.

Research and achievements
St. Jude remains at the forefront of research on catastrophic childhood illnesses, and is the only pediatric research hospital that receives support from the National Cancer Institute. Additionally, St. Jude is the home of Good Manufacturing Practices, LLC, the nation's only pediatric research center that produces highly specialized medicines and vaccines, making it the world's only Comprehensive Cancer Center devoted entirely to children.

These are some of the recent achievements of St. Jude:

• Thanks to research conducted at St. Jude, the survival rate for meduloblastoma, the most common type of brain tumor among children, has risen from 15% when the hospital opened to 85% today. The survival rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common type of childhood cancer, has jumped from 4% to 94%.
• In 2010, St. Jude faculty published almost 700 articles in medical journals, more than any other pediatric research center in the United States.
• An adult lung cancer drug that has recently been approved by the FDA wouldn't have been possible without research done at St. Jude ten years ago.
• Until recently, adolescents had relatively few chances of surviving acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but a recent study resulted in a 90% survival rate.
• St. Jude is collaborating with Washington University School of Medicine to decode the genome of more than 600 childhood cancer patients. The project has already resulted in a new computer tool for identifying the genetic errors that cause cancer.

The future of St. Jude
St. Jude continues an extensive expansion program to bolster the hospital's research and treatment efforts, while more than doubling the size of the original St. Jude campus. Recently, St. Jude has added two new departments: Chemical Biology & Therapeutics and Cancer Prevention and Control. Future growth will include a new Integrated Patient Care and Research Building where rapidly evolving CT (computerized tomography) and MR (magnetic resonance) technology will keep St. Jude at the cutting edge for radiation therapy in a pediatric / adolescent setting.

In the next five years, St. Jude plans to establish new departments including computational biology; add new research, treatment and educational facilities; use new technologies like proton beam therapy; hire new faculty and staff; and continue with already existing priorities, like the discovery and development of new medicines.

Additionally, St. Jude has the goal of helping its affiliated clinics around the world to develop their own protocols and be self-sufficient so that more children in developing countries have access to the most advanced medical care.

>>Back