hero

The man who invented modern advertising put his fortune and his methods behind medical research, founding the Lasker Foundation with his wife Mary in 1942; after his death in 1952 she carried the campaign for cancer research into law.

Diagnosed with neuroblastoma before her first birthday, she set up a lemonade stand at four to raise money for her hospital. By her death at eight in 2004 it had raised $1 million; the foundation in her name has raised hundreds of millions since.

In the 1940s the General Motors chairman joined engineer Charles Kettering to establish the Sloan Kettering Institute, dedicated in 1948, which gave Memorial Hospital a research arm and its modern name.

After her husband Robert was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer in 1987 at 46, she turned the family's fortune to Northwestern's cancer centre, which carries his name, and to the children's hospital that carries both.

In 2014 his parents took him from a British hospital to seek proton beam therapy for a brain tumour abroad, were arrested, then vindicated. The case sped the building of NHS proton centres.

After a mastectomy in 1978 she wrote The Cancer Journals, refusing a prosthesis and the expectation that women hide their cancer. The book became a founding text of patient writing.

In 1992 she was the first patient with recurrent HER2-positive breast cancer to be treated with the antibody that became Herceptin, in Dennis Slamon's trial at UCLA. She became its first long-term survivor.

He argued that breast cancer is a systemic disease from early on, then proved in randomised trials that lumpectomy with radiation equals mastectomy and that tamoxifen after surgery, and even before cancer, saves lives.

The Gates Foundation has committed $4.1 billion to Gavi, the vaccine alliance it helped found in 2000, whose HPV programme had fully immunised nearly 60 million girls against cervical cancer by the end of 2024.

After his mother died of melanoma he organised a bike ride across Massachusetts in 1980 with 36 riders; the Pan-Mass Challenge has since raised $1.125 billion for Dana-Farber and passes on every rider-raised dollar.

He pushed a shelved kinase inhibitor through the laboratory and into a 1998 trial when few believed a targeted pill could work. Imatinib made chronic myeloid leukaemia a disease people live with, and became the model for targeted therapy.

A retired railway engineer from Oregon with chronic myeloid leukaemia, he was the first person to take the drug that became Gleevec, in June 1998, after reading about Brian Druker's research in a newspaper.

The inventor of the electric car starter and head of General Motors research joined Alfred Sloan in the 1940s to establish the Sloan Kettering Institute for cancer research.

Nurse, social worker and doctor who opened St Christopher's Hospice in 1967 and established that pain in advanced cancer could be prevented with regular oral morphine and attention to the whole person.

Diagnosed with bowel cancer at 35, she spent five years telling people to check their poo, co-hosted the BBC's You, Me and the Big C, and raised over £11 million for Cancer Research UK in the weeks before her death in 2022.

In 1971 he put nearly all of his international holdings into a cancer research institute that carries his name reluctantly; it has since spent more than $1.8 billion of its own money on cancer science.

Treated for prostate cancer from 1992, he gave MIT $100 million in 2007 to build an institute that puts engineers and cancer biologists under one roof, and MSK $150 million in 2015 for a new outpatient cancer building.

Her 2007 melanoma diagnosis led her and her husband Leon to found the Melanoma Research Alliance, now the largest private funder of melanoma research.

As the founding director of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in 1962 he designed Total Therapy, combining drugs with treatment of the brain and spinal fluid, and raised childhood leukaemia cure rates from near zero to about half within a decade.

A 12-year-old lymphoma patient of Sidney Farber whose 1948 radio broadcast launched the Jimmy Fund, which has funded Dana-Farber for more than 75 years.

Eli and Edythe Broad gave $100 million in 2004 to start the Broad Institute and kept giving until their total passed $700 million in 2013; the genomics it produced underpins much of precision oncology.

Her 1969 book On Death and Dying, based on interviews with terminally ill patients in a Chicago hospital, made it acceptable for doctors to talk with patients about dying and helped launch the American hospice movement.

With Emil Freireich he showed that combinations of drugs could cure childhood leukaemia, then extended the idea to Hodgkin lymphoma and to adjuvant treatment after surgery.

At the NCI in the early 1960s he and Emil Frei gave children four drugs at once, VAMP, against fierce opposition, and turned a uniformly fatal leukaemia into a curable one. He also worked out platelet transfusion.

The first child treated with CAR-T cells, in 2012. Her recovery from relapsed leukaemia turned an experimental idea into an approved therapy.

A breast cancer survivor and Estée Lauder executive who co-created the pink ribbon in 1992 and founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in 1993, now one of the largest private funders of breast cancer research.

A lawyer treated for breast cancer in 1987 who built the National Breast Cancer Coalition and won the Department of Defense breast cancer programme, the first to put trained patient advocates on scientific review panels.

In 2014 the Columbia Sportswear chairwoman gave $100 million to OHSU's Knight Cancer Institute, the largest single contribution toward matching Phil and Penny Knight's $500 million challenge.

Without a doctorate, she and George Hitchings designed drugs to block DNA building blocks. Their 6-mercaptopurine of 1951 remains part of the cure for childhood leukaemia; she won the Nobel Prize in 1988.

His Goh Foundation's $50 million gift built the Goh Cheng Liang Proton Therapy Centre at the National Cancer Centre Singapore, the only public proton therapy service in the country.

Against the consensus that herpes was to blame, he proposed in 1976 that papillomaviruses cause cervical cancer and isolated HPV16 and HPV18 from tumours in 1983-84, making vaccination and HPV testing possible. Nobel Prize 2008.

The cancer centre at UCSF carries her name, and in 2017 the Helen Diller Foundation gave UCSF $500 million, the largest gift in its history, bringing the family's total there to $650 million.

Her cervical cancer cells, taken in 1951 without her knowledge, became HeLa, the first immortal human cell line. Her story changed how consent and family rights in research are handled.

Herbert and Florence Irving's gifts to Columbia began with $8.5 million in 1987, founded its cancer centre in 1995 and ended with a $700 million bequest in 2017 for cancer research; the total passed $900 million.

In 1991 he and Jian Zhou made HPV virus-like particles in the laboratory, the basis of the vaccines that could eliminate cervical cancer. Australia, where the vaccine was rolled out first, is on course to do so.

At Harlem Hospital in the 1950s she showed methotrexate could shrink breast and skin cancers, tested drugs on patients' own tumour cells, and in 1964 was the only woman among the seven founders of ASCO.

Working part-time at her dining-room table in 1972, she showed the Philadelphia chromosome in CML is a swap between chromosomes 9 and 22. Cancer had a genetic cause, and imatinib later hit the fused gene.

A Chinese virologist whose skill in expressing viral proteins made the first HPV virus-like particles in 1991. He died in 1999 at 42, seven years before the vaccine reached the public.

A psychiatrist who set up the first full-time psychiatry service in a cancer hospital at Memorial Sloan Kettering in 1977, founded the field's societies and journal, and made distress a vital sign in cancer care.

In 1936 he donated the land on York Avenue to which Memorial Hospital moved; Memorial Sloan Kettering has been there ever since.

In 1884 he and his wife Charlotte were among the group who founded New York Cancer Hospital, the institution that became Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

A chemicals billionaire treated for cancer several times, he and his wife Karen founded Huntsman Cancer Institute in 1995 and their family gave more than $400 million to build its research institute and hospital.

In 1971 he proposed that tumours cannot grow beyond a few millimetres without recruiting blood vessels, and that blocking them could treat cancer. Dismissed for decades, the idea produced bevacizumab and a class of drugs.

A geriatrician with a rare sarcoma who noticed that the staff treating her did not introduce themselves. Her 2013 campaign, #hellomynameis, was adopted by hundreds of thousands of health workers.

Diagnosed with incurable breast cancer at 23 after her symptoms were dismissed, she founded CoppaFeel! in 2009 to teach young people to check their chests. She lived with the disease for fifteen years.

In 2016 he founded an institute in Los Angeles to reimagine cancer care, and his Ellison Institute of Technology is building an Oxford campus with a £130 million alliance with the university.

After his wife Debra's melanoma diagnosis in 2007 the couple founded the Melanoma Research Alliance, which has put more than $200 million into research while they pay its running costs so every donated dollar goes to science.

In 1997 he and his wife Madlyn, a cancer survivor, gave the University of Pennsylvania the gift that created the Abramson Cancer Center, where CAR-T therapy was later developed.

Since 1980 he has put more than HK$30 billion into his foundation; its Heart of Gold programme gave free hospice care to tens of thousands of poor terminal cancer patients, and its gift built the Cambridge centre that houses Cancer Research UK's institute there.

In the late 1970s the owner of Calumet Farm approved a $1 million gift, the first of many, and in 1983 the Lucille Parker Markey Cancer Center was founded in her name in Lexington.

Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1998 at 51, he set up a foundation that awarded ten $100,000 grants in its first year and became the largest private funder of pancreatic cancer research; he died in 1999.

In 1999 the Ingram family made what Vanderbilt calls a transformational gift in honour of the late E. Bronson Ingram; the centre took the family's name and became Tennessee's leading cancer research centre.

She turned the American Cancer Society into a research funder in the 1940s, built the Lasker Awards, and led the lobbying that produced the 1971 National Cancer Act and the modern NCI budget.

In 1990 she showed that a single gene on chromosome 17, BRCA1, causes inherited breast and ovarian cancer, when most of the field doubted such a gene existed. Genetic testing and risk-reducing care followed.

In 2016 his $50 million, matched by Sidney Kimmel and others to $125 million, launched a Johns Hopkins institute that put more than a hundred scientists and clinicians to work on cancer immunotherapy.

Diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 1993, the financier founded the Prostate Cancer Foundation, whose grants helped pay for the science behind abiraterone and enzalutamide and built a network of precision oncology centres for US veterans.

He never saw the hospital: his foundation, left $19 million on his death in 1939, matched the State of Texas's $500,000 in 1941 on condition the new cancer hospital be built in Houston and carry his name.

His 2006 pledge of $100 million, then the largest individual commitment in MSK's history, built a 23-storey laboratory tower that nearly doubled the centre's research space.

She promised her dying sister, Susan Komen, that she would end breast cancer, and in 1982 founded the organisation that created the Race for the Cure and made breast cancer a mainstream cause.

Phil and Penny Knight gave OHSU $100 million in 2008, a $500 million challenge in 2013 that Oregon met within two years, and $2 billion in 2025, described by OHSU as the largest gift to a US university.