Why Glimmers Foundation?

Changing the Future.

When 11-year-old, Ava Decker, was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer, in December 2022, her family’s world shattered. Although they found excellent medical care from the Pediatric Sarcoma Center at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospitals in Los Angeles, treatments were brutal, they quickly learned a terrifying truth:

Ava was receiving the same treatment for her cancer that was created over 50 years ago simply because there hasn’t been progress due to a major lack of funding to discover less toxic and more effective treatments. Despite aggressive surgery and highly toxic chemotherapy, the cancer spread throughout her body, and Ava died at the age of 13-years-old, on Thursday, May 9, 2024.

While adult cancer treatments have seen stunning advancements, children’s cancer treatments have not and are severely underfunded, especially less common cancers such as sarcomas. Although pediatric cancer is the leading cause of death by disease in children and teens in the United States, yet only 4% of the federal cancer research funding is for pediatric cancer.

Each day approximately 47 children are diagnosed with cancer in the U.S., which means more than 17,000 children in the U.S. are diagnosed each year, resulting in the death of approximately 1,800 deaths each year. Even scarier? That number is increasing each year.

Pediatric cancer research needs to catch up, and fast.

Our kids deserve investing in treatments developed by cutting-edge research.

Together, we can do better.