Dr. Karen Anderson, a professor and medical oncologist in the Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics, and her colleague Joshua LaBaer, executive director of the center, spent more than 15 years looking for the medical equivalent of a needle in a haystack.

LaBaer and Anderson believed they could use the body’s own immune system to detect cancer in the body. Their challenge lay in isolating, among millions of antibodies, a handful that indicate the presence of cancer. It was painstaking work.

But it led to a breakthrough in cancer detection: a simple blood test that identifies breast cancer in its earliest stages, when women have a higher chance of survival.

LaBaer, Anderson and their fellow scientists in the Piper Center are among the nation’s foremost investigators in the field of personalized diagnostics and the discovery of biomarkers — the unique molecular fingerprints of disease — which can provide early warning for those at risk of diseases like cancer and diabetes.

When you give to the center, you make a real difference in the fight against disease. Your gifts are a precious commodity for frontline researchers like LaBaer and Anderson, providing critical seed money for their work. Because of donors like you, research scientists can move ahead with novel ideas and develop preliminary data that help them win federal grants for their work.

Your gift will go to front-line researchers working on promising new treatments and cures.