Melanoma patient's legacy lives on in $450,000 gift to Penn research
Even as she underwent an exhaustive round of therapies and surgeries for advanced melanoma that spread to her brain, 28-year-old Tara Miller always wanted to make a difference for others with her disease.
Even as she underwent an exhaustive round of therapies and surgeries for advanced melanoma that spread to her brain, 28-year-old Tara Miller always wanted to make a difference for others with her disease.
Before her death in 2014, the aspiring attorney from Longport, N.J., created a foundation that on Tuesday night presented Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center with a check for $450,000, bringing the total it has donated to Penn to $1.1 million.
The Tara Miller Foundation, which raised $525,000 this year, most of it from its third annual Make the Best of it Bash, is donating the remaining $75,000 raised to the Melanoma Research Alliance. MRA is the foundation's first international research effort, in Israel, that will be focused on late-stage brain metastasis.
Melanoma is the most common cancer in adults ages 25 to 29 and the second most common in people 15 to 29 years old. About 80,000 new cases of melanoma and 10,000 deaths are expected this year in the U.S.
In the last three years, the Tara Miller Foundation has raised about $1.5 million, every dollar of which goes to research.
"What makes this foundation unusual is that Tara had a clear idea of what she wanted the foundation to do when she was alive," said Lynn Schuchter, chief of the division of hematology oncology at Penn and Tara's medical oncologist. "Her drive was to find new treatment and cures for melanoma."
This year, the donation will fund five projects at Penn: an attempt to understand why melanoma cells sometimes become resistant to treatment; a partnership with the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy to develop a personalized vaccine for melanoma tailored to a person's unique mutation profile; a study of why brain cells are the perfect environment for melanoma cells; and a study of "RadVax," a combination of two immunotherapies with radiation.
"All of the research presents novel ideas," said Schuchter. "This is where Tara's legacy is incredibly important. Before you can get big grants you need to get data to support new ideas. This grant helps those new ideas move forward."
During Miller's time at Penn, she was treated with cutting-edge therapies as fast as the FDA could approve them.
In a speech she gave at the first event for the foundation, when she was already quite sick, she said that her medical records could serve as a timeline of FDA approvals, but that while she had access to all of the latest and most groundbreaking treatments, it simply was not enough.
"She couldn't understand how her disease spread so quickly and how to get it under control, but she knew that she wanted to do something for others who found themselves in her situation," said her twin sister, Lauren, a Comcast marketer who works part time at the foundation. "She had an infectious positivity and didn't want anyone to go through what she was going through – bad choices and bad options."
Tara Miller died six weeks before her 30th birthday.
"I think of her every day, of calling her when something good happens," her sister said. "The foundation is such a huge accomplishment with so many people who have gotten behind the donations and I want to share it with her.
"Having the foundation is a way to keep her close every day. To do something we know she wanted."
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