Canary Approach
This is the Canary approach, and it's what makes it possible for us to maximize results in early cancer detection. Like a startup, we embrace investing early, failing forward, and continually pivoting to achieve success.
Self-Sustaining Platform
Where other foundations may have a single model for investment, we see our success as building a 'self-sustaining platform' that is enabling everything from world class research facilities to collaborations with academia and partnerships with industry to ongoing clinical programs, and successful spinouts of diagnostic companies.
But our real success will be measured by the lives we ultimately save with breakthrough innovations in early cancer detection. The cancer fight requires this kind of bold, innovative approach.
Platform Components
Funding Strategy
Funding New Ideas—New Ways of Thinking and Doing
We are all about the big idea in cancer research, but that doesn't mean we can't start small. Canary funds small, short-term discovery projects for new ideas and technologies.
The pilot data and other discoveries from these small projects give our scientists a competitive advantage in the government fund-raising process with grants from the National Institutes of Health, one of the world's foremost medical research centers, and others. And it's working.
Funding Approach
Canary Center at Stanford
Breaking New Ground on University Collaborations
The Canary Center at Stanford was formed in 2009 with a $50-million, 10-year investment.
It is the model for future early cancer detection centers, and the first center in the world to integrate research in both in vivo and in vitro diagnostics to deliver these tests by housing state of the art core facilities and collaborative research programs in molecular imaging, proteomics, chemistry, and bioinformatics.
Spinning Out New Diagnostics Companies
As we spin out new diagnostic test companies, or medical device and imaging technology, we feel confident that the Canary funding platform and approach works. Commercial viability is the ultimate test. Canary-funded research is finding its way into commercialization.
Commercial Success
Our spinout companies represent the ultimate validation of the Canary approach—transforming breakthrough research into real-world diagnostic solutions.