Each year, 1.4 million people are diagnosed with lung cancer worldwide. The 5-year survival rate for these patients is only 15.9%.

In this episode of the Peter Hofland and Sonia Portillo, the team behind The Onco'Zine Brief, interview Bonnie Adario, Cancer Survivor.

Addario was was first diagnosed with stage 3b lung cancer in 2004, a cancer with a survival rate of only 5%. As part of her treatment, Addario underwent surgery to remove one lobe, radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and, against the odds, became a lung cancer survivor.

After this experience, she felt an urgent need to impact lung cancer care in a big way.

In 2006, she started the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, now one of the largest philanthropies that is exclusively dedicated to lung cancer.

The foundation Addario set up has the goal of working with a diverse group of physician’s organization, industry partners, patients and survivors in efforts to find solutions and make meaningful changes in lung cancer, and they hope to turn lung cancer into a chronically managed disease by 2023.

Addario's foundation manages several projects, some in collaboration with the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute – an international non-profit research consortium.

This research consortium, also called ‘Alchmey’, directly facilitates collaboration between investigators from over 22 institutions in the United States and Europe, and is supported by research infrastructures including centralized tissue banks and data systems.

They also combine the expertise of scientific and medical professionals with patient’s access through a network of community cancer centers.

This helps to accelerate research and advance ongoing projects from both the foundation and the medical institute.

In this interview, Addario shares with some inside perspectives on where we are with lung cancer treatment, as well as some of the exciting projects being developed by her team at the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation.