March 2025

 

Dear Friends,

 

We greatly appreciate your support of the Garrett B. Smith Foundation (GBSF) and want to provide you with our annual update.  Heidi and I established the foundation in memory of our four-year-old son who passed away on January 30, 1995, after a brief struggle with cancer.  Over the years, the foundation has raised more than $5 million and spent more than $4 million on original programs to help seriously ill children. We plan to rely on our endowment to fund these programs going forward. 

 

GBSF’s single largest expenditure remains clown care at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. Dr. Chester Drawers (Leo Desilets), a GBSF clown since we started in 1997, supervises our program.  Leo just hired a new clown, Dr. Apple Juice, expanding his team to 7 professionals, including “Doctors” Ya’ Don’t Say, Quackenbush, Lily Pad, Bafu, Sprocket, and Varlekine.  The crew “operates” three days per week for five hours each day, visiting all pediatric units of the hospital. 

 

Our clowns work under the auspices of Healthy Humor, a nonprofit which manages clown care units at 15 hospitals nationwide.  We recently extended our agreement with HH through 2027, raising our annual cost 5% to $97K this year and $100K for the following two years.  The increase covers inflation, increased therapy time for the clowns to unwind, and increased costs of commuting from New York City to New Haven.  Given the great reviews Healthy Humor has received from Yale staff, we feel the increases are well justified. 

 

Our GBSF fellows, Dr. Sandra Ryeom and Dr. Charles Roberts, continue to pioneer new cancer treatments.  We started funding these doctors when they were young investigators.  Both now run internationally recognized research laboratories. We’ve summarized their most recent accomplishments here. 

   

Thanks to a generous lead gift in 2015 by Peter Wright through the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, our fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Sandra Ryeom at the Irving Medical Center at Columbia University is now endowed in perpetuity.  Dr. Ryeom and her team are currently investigating personalized immunotherapy approaches to fight stomach and gastroesophageal cancers.  By genetically modifying a patient’s T cells, a type of white blood cell, she hopes to design therapies that target and destroy tumors.  Her lab is working with Samsung Medical Center to open a clinical trial in South Korea later this year and in the United States shortly thereafter.  Dr. Ryeom is also utilizing AI technology to build an analytical platform capable of sorting through vast amounts of biological data to identify genetic targets for solid tumors outside of the stomach.   

 

Thanks to a second generous lead gift by Peter Wright through the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, we permanently endowed our fellowship in Dr. Roberts’ lab at St. Jude Children’s Hospital, re-naming it The Garrett B. Smith and The Wright Foundation Research Fellowship, in 2024.  Dr. Roberts is the rare scientist devoted to children’s cancer, a field that is not well funded by major pharmaceutical companies since it is unprofitable.  He continues to study the SWI/SNF gene complex, which is at the heart of rhabdoid tumors, a lethal childhood affliction.  In 2024, his lab, in collaboration with Harvard and Stanford, uncovered two proteins, DCAF5 and PHF6, that enable defective SWI/SNF genes to thrive and grow tumors. Investigators are now using AI technology to screen billions of chemical compounds to uncover possible drugs to destroy these two proteins.  Accordingly, two prominent scientific journals, Nature and Nature Communications, published Dr. Roberts’ findings last year.   

 

Since SWI/SNF mutations are present in most adult cancers, Dr. Roberts’ work has much broader implications. Utilization of Tazverik, a drug developed by Epizyme (now owned by Ipsen) based on discoveries in Dr. Roberts’ lab, continues to blossom.  In its acquisition announcement, Ipsen called Tazverik “a first-in-class, chemotherapy-free EZH2 [protein] inhibitor.”   It is now in a Stage 3 trial for adults with follicular lymphoma.  Other pharma companies are also investigating.  Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston is in the early stages of a lymphoma trial as well.

 

Heidi and I are extremely proud of the accomplishments of the Garrett B. Smith Foundation.  Our efforts remain a labor of love for our son and his memory.  Although we recently observed the thirtieth anniversary of Garrett’s passing, his words still brighten our every day:

 

“Sun’s up - time to play!”

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Thank you,

 

Scott and Heidi Smith

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