Stuart’s Fund

2024 Fundraiser Now Live!

Celebrate Stuart’s birthday today – he would have been 18 – with a gift to Stuart’s Fund! You need a T-shirt or hoodie to help find a test, a treatment and a cure for HSA (hemangiosarcoma).

You’ve helped raise more than $3,000 for research with you gifts over the last two campaigns.

Choose your shirts here and tell your friends. You can also make a donation through the “donate now” button on the blogroll. Just add the fund number 876913 to be sure that your gift gets where it needs to go.

We thank you. We appreciate you. You’re what keeps us hopeful that HSA will one day be a thing of the past.

Online Donations Now Accepted

Now it’s easier than ever to support hemangiosarcoma research through Stuart’s Fund!

We’ve just added a link on the Blogroll (to the right).

Through this Donate Now! link, you’ll be taken to the Virginia Tech Foundation’s giving page. This is where Stuart’s Fund is housed to benefit the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.

From the pull down menu, choose the “College of Veterinary Medicine” and you’ll be on your way! Just be sure to designate your gift to Stuart’s Fund.

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Many Thanks

Thanks to so many folks around the world who participated in our 2016 limited edition T-Shirt campaign, we’ve raised $1,007 to support HSA research.

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THANK YOU!

8 Days Left!

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There’s still time to order your Stuart’s Fund “Say No to Hemangio” T-shirt! The campaign closes at midnight, October 12.

We’re 41 shirts strong on our way to the goal of 300.

We can do this!

https://www.bonfirefunds.com/stuarts-fund-2

The Countdown Continues

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We’re ironing out the details of Stuart’s Fund so that you can learn more about Hemangiosarcoma (HSA).

Until this site is entirely up and running, and fundraising mechanisms have been put in place, here’s an intro.

From Dr. Nick Dervisis, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (Oncology) Medical Oncology/Assistant Professor at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine:

Hemangiosarcoma is an aggressive and common cancer in dogs. While cutaneous masses are often treatable by tumor excision, visceral and cardiac tumors are almost always incurable. Treatment options for this disease have been limited with virtually no significant advances in the last 30 years, mostly due to our poor understanding of the disease biology. While we have thought that HSA originates from neoplastic endothelial cells, accumulating data now suggest a bone marrow progenitor as the cell of origin for this disease. 

 Dr. Erin Fagan, our Medical Oncology Resident is working on exploring a cell signalling pathway in HSA. The Jak/STAT signaling pathway functions to regulate cell growth and proliferation in many normal bone marrow cells. Dysregulation of the Jak/STAT pathway has implications in human malignancies, including leukemias, lymphomas, and sarcomas. To date, there is very little research investigating presence and activity of this pathway in canine HSA. The aim of Dr. Fagan’s study is to identify and characterize the activity of this pathway in hemangiosarcoma. We use archived tumor tissues, from dogs diagnosed with the disease, and interrogate the signaling pathway’s activation status using immunohistochemistry.

Stuart’s Fund helps support this study and more.

Thank you for your interest.

Stay tuned as the countdown continues.