Quick Facts about St. Jude

• St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was founded in 1962 by the late entertainer Danny Thomas. Its mission is to find cures for children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. St. Jude has treated children from all 50 states and from around the world.
• On average, 5,400 active patients visit the hospital each year, most of whom are treated on an outpatient basis.
• St. Jude has 78 inpatient beds and treats upwards of 250 patients each day.
• St. Jude is the first and only pediatric cancer center to be designated as a Comprehensive Cancer Center by the National Cancer Institute.
• St. Jude is the first institution established for the sole purpose of conducting basic and clinical research and treatment into catastrophic childhood diseases, mainly cancer.
• Research findings at St. Jude are shared freely with doctors and scientists all over the world.
• St. Jude also enjoys a worldwide reputation as a teaching facility. The medical and scientific staff published more than 600 articles in academic journals in 2008, more than any other pediatric cancer research center in the United States. This is an average of a St. Jude paper being published every 17 hours.
• St. Jude is the only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatment not covered by insurance. No child is ever denied treatment because of the family’s inability to pay.
• St. Jude has developed protocols that have helped push overall survival rates for childhood cancers from less than 20 percent when the hospital opened in 1962 to 80 percent today. The current St. Jude survival rates for selected childhood cancers now include:

• In 1962, the survival rate for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood cancer, was 4 percent. Today, the survival rate for this once deadly disease is 94 percent, thanks to research and treatment protocols developed at St. Jude.
• The daily operating cost for St. Jude is nearly $1.4 million, which is primarily covered by public contributions.
• During the past three years, 84 cents of every dollad received has supported the research and treatment at St. Jude.
• St. Jude recently completed an extensive expansion program that bolstered the hospital’s research and treatment efforts, while more than doubling the size of its original campus. The campus now has 2.5 million square feet of research, clinical and administrative space dedicated to finding cures and saving children. The expansion included the Children’s GMP, LLC, currently the nation’s only pediatric research center on-site facility for the research and production of highly specialized treatments and vaccines; an expanded Department of Immunology; and a new Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics for discovery of new drugs.
• The Chili’s Care Center, opened in November 2007, integrates patient care and research where rapidly evolving CT (computerized tomography) and MR (magnetic resonance) technologies keep St. Jude at the cutting edge for radiation therapy in a pediatric/adolescent setting. Additionally, a state-of-the-art cyclotron enables St. Jude researchers to undertake many important new PET (positron emission tomography) studies. These imaging techniques facilitate the rapid evaluation of new therapeutic approaches and help choose those most likely to be successful.
• St. Jude pioneered a combination of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to treat childhood cancers.
• Peter C. Doherty, PhD, of the St. Jude Immunology department, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996. He shares the award with Rolf M. Zinkernagel, MD, of the University of Zurich. Their findings have led to breakthroughs in the understanding and treatment of viral infections and cancers, and in the development of organ transplant procedures and vaccines.
• St. Jude patients are referred by a physician, and generally have a disease currently under study and are eligible for a current research protocol on clinical research trials.
• St. Jude researchers and doctors are treating children with genetic immune defects and pediatric AIDS, as well as using new drugs and therapies to fight infections.
• St. Jude was the first institution to develop a cure for sickle cell disease with a bone marrow transplant and has one of the largest pediatric sickle cell programs in the country.
• St. Jude is a World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza Viruses in Animals and Birds.
• St. Jude was the first facility outside the National Institutes of Health to receive federal approval for research involving human gene therapy.
• The St. Jude faculty includes three National Academy of Sciences members: Peter C. Doherty, PhD, of Immunology; Charles Sherr, MD, PhD, of Tumor Cell Biology; and Robert Webster, PhD, of Infectious Diseases. Sherr and Brenda Schulman, PhD, Structural Biology, hold the coveted title of Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators.
• The St. Jude faculty also includes four members of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences: William E. Evans, PharmD, St. Jude director and chief executive officer; Arthur Nienhuis, MD, of Hematology and former director and CEO; Charles Sherr, MD, PhD, of Tumor Cell Biology; and Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty, PhD, of Immunology.
• St. Jude is the national coordinating center for the National Cancer Institute-funded Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium. St. Jude is the coordinating center for the nationwide Children’s Cancer Survivor Study, funded by the National Cancer Institute. St. Jude is the national coordinating center for the National Cancer Institute-sponsored Pediatric Drug Discovery Consortium. St. Jude is the coordinating center for a national study of sickle cell disease treatment funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Cancer Institute.