Quick Facts about St. Jude

• Families never pay St. Jude for anything.

• St. Jude’s groundbreaking development of combination therapy for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood cancer, revolutionized leukemia therapy worldwide and increased the survival rate from 4 percent, when St. Jude opened in 1962, to 94 percent today.

• During the past five years, 81 cents of every dollar received has supported the research and treatment at St. Jude.

• St. Jude sees more than 7,800 children a year from across the United States and from around the world, while many more children are seen at St. Jude affiliate sites around the country.

• St. Jude’s scientific discoveries are freely shared with scientific and medical communities throughout the world. Teams of doctors come from every region of the world to study with us for months at a time and utilize our protocols in their treatment centers.

• The medical and scientific staff at St. Jude published more than 600 articles in academic journals in 2008, which is an average of a published paper every 17 hours.

• St. Jude is the first and only pediatric cancer center to be designated as a Comprehensive Cancer Center by the National Cancer Institute.

• In 2009, Parents magazine named St. Jude the No. 1 pediatric cancer care hospital in the country, based on the magazine’s survey of more than 75 children’s hospitals nationwide.

• The St. Jude After Completion of Therapy (ACT) program is the largest long-term, follow-up clinic for pediatric cancer patients in the United States. The Clinic’s accomplishments are now an integral part of national guidelines for screening and managing the late effects of survivors of pediatric cancer. St. Jude is also home to the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study, a collaborative study among 29 U.S.and Canadian institutions that includes more than 20,000 childhood cancer survivors. The study is chaired by Les Robison, PhD, chair of the St. Jude Epidemiology and Cancer Control department.

• St. Jude is the only pediatric research center with an on-site Good Manufacturing Practices facility to research and then produce highly specialized medicines and vaccines that pharmaceutical companies do not produce. Opened in 2003, the facility is now known as the Children’s GMP, LLC.