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What Matters To You

Individuals whose lives are affected by lung disease care most about how laboratory discoveries can succeed in people. 

Science is the basis of medical practice.  Moving scientific advances into clinical care can cure, reverse, relieve, or prevent disease.   Remarkable advances in molecular biology, genetics, and other fundamental sciences leads to impatience for real therapeutic progress.

Two obstacles face us. One is the way medical research works. 

Stage One:  see a problem, think of an idea, develop a theory, test the theory again and again.  Sometimes the theory is correct, but 99.9% of the time, it's back to the drawing board.  Even the most successful ideas cannot always be applied to human disease. 

There's no stockpile of medical discoveries that just need to be translated to treating people. We still need new, better science. 

The second obstacle is the necessary safeguards that slow human clinical research.  Treating people with an untested process is dangerous, even with the most promising results from Stage One.

Our goal, to meet patients' needs, is to speed up the process by funding innovative research on important diseases.