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Researchers recently revealed in a Nature Genetics paper that they had identified a new gene linked to ALS, a neurodegenerative condition also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The July announcement was a milestone in the fight against ALS, which affects about 30,000 Americans, and a historic moment in financing disease research.
That's because the discovery was made possible by donations from people who completed the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, a viral fundraising effort that called for donors to dump ice water over their heads.
Now is the time to build off this success and accelerate research to eradicate cancer.
Cancer is an ideal subject for the next phase of this phenomenon. Some 1,500 people in the U.S. die from cancer every day, and about 14.5 million living Americans have had the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. Half of men and one-third of women will develop cancer in their lifetimes. According to a 2010 American Cancer Society report, "lost years of life and productivity caused by cancer represent the single largest drain on the global economy" compared with other causes of death.
Social media is similarly pervasive, with 65 percent of the U.S. population using at least one social-media profile. Facebook alone has 1.71 billion active users across the globe. The multitudes touched by cancer also use social media, millions of them daily. This offers unprecedented capacity for crowd funding, especially when celebrities with large online followings get involved.
Yet, with crowd funding cancer research, the bar shouldn't be set at replicating the Ice Bucket Challenge's emphatic success. Since cancer comes in many variations and affects people in unique ways, the model for organizing support on social media should be diffused and democratized. This means many smaller campaigns instead of a single iconic one, each focused on how a particular iteration of the disease affects people's personal lives regardless of their fame, fortune or status.
Ryan Smith — CEO of Qualtrics, a technology company based in Utah — nearly lost his father to cancer a decade and a half ago and was touched by the ordeal. Qualtrics joined the Huntsman Cancer Institute to form a partnership called Five for the Fight. We harnessed the social reach of our combined professional and personal networks to raise money for cancer research.
Our concept is simple: Participants donate $5 in the name of someone who has battled cancer. Then they tag five others and ask them to do the same through a photo or short video. More than $1 million has been raised for cancer research this way.
For years, social media has been used for things like political bickering, cyber bullying and cat videos, but the Ice Bucket Challenge demonstrates a new way of using this channel of communication.
The barriers to contribution are very low, and there is great potential to fund other public health efforts on social media, beginning with cancer. I challenge all of cancer's direct and indirect victims to be part of this experiment.
Jon Huntsman Sr. is the founder of the Huntsman Chemical Corporation and the Huntsman Cancer Institute. This op-ed first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.