National Cancer Coalition and Schering-Plough Helping Cancer Patients in Honduras

Tegucigalpa is the country’s largest city and its capital. It has a tropical climate that is tempered by its elevated, mountain location. Like the rest of Honduras, many residents of Tegucigalpa live below the poverty line.

 

Located in Tegucigalpa, Hospital Escuela is the primary pediatric hospital in Honduras. One hundred and fifty children are treated there each year for all types of cancer.   Because of the high poverty rates, many patients are not able to afford the treatments they need.   The hospital receives limited support from the government and is grateful to organizations like the National Cancer Coalition (NCC) for providing life-saving chemotherapies and other treatments.  NCC makes treatment available to those who are unable afford it, impacting the patient’s chances of survival and overall cancer survival rates in Honduras.

 

NCC has conducted several projects in Honduras over the past 6 years through its flagship international medical assistance program NCC Cares.  This program supplies hospitals and clinics in 40 impoverished countries around the world with the tools needed to fight cancer and other life threatening diseases. Through NCC Cares, requested cancer pharmaceuticals have been provided to Hospital Escuela, Hospital Rivas, and other Honduran cancer hospitals and clinics, so that oncologists at those facilities have the medicines required to properly treat their patients with leukemia, solid tumors and other forms of cancer.  

 

One of NCC’s newest programs is a partnership with Schering-Plough Corporation to provide the brain cancer treatment, Temodar, free of charge to patients who can not afford to purchase this medicine.

 

Since 2007, NCC and Schering-Plough Corporation have partnered to provide Temodar to cancer patients at Hospital Escuela and at Hospital Rivas in San Pedro Sula.  Temodar is a brain cancer treatment produced by Schering-Plough which is used to treat patients with glioblastoma multiforme and anaplastic astrocytoma.  Through the NCC/Schering-Plough partnership, underserved cancer patients in Honduras and other developing countries are receiving treatment for life threatening brain tumors. 

 

This program was expanded in 2008 to 17 additional hospitals that are all part of NCC’s Global Cancer Relief Network.  NCC’s network provides a platform for the formation of public, private, and governmental collaborative partnerships to fulfill the needs of cancer patients that require innovative first line therapies, like Temodar, that require monitoring and high levels of oversight. The 17 recipient hospitals that are participating in the expanded program partnership are located in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru and Uruguay.  It is expected that over 150 patients with brain tumors will benefit from the donated Temodar in the first year.

 

Through this program, patients who desperately need modern brain cancer therapies are able to access these treatments.  Hope is being given and lives are being saved.