Kids Beating Cancer’s Mission
Kids Beating Cancer provides access to life-saving treatments through the science of cellular therapy and advancing pediatric innovative, novel, research, moving new discoveries to patient care, while supporting the children and their families throughout the journey to a cure.
Science is the cure to saving children’s lives.
OUR PHILOSOPHY FOR OUR PROGRAMS
Keep Hope Alive – Fight for a Cure for Every Child – Keep the Family Together
Kids Beating Cancer’s vision is to have a place dedicated to curing children. Kids Beating Cancer’s focus is on the belief we all strive for—the day when no child will die in the dawn of life.
For parents of a child diagnosed with cancer or one of 80 malignant and non-malignant life-threatening diseases, we don’t want them to just hope for a cure. Kids Beating Cancer wants to be the conduit that makes a cure possible.
Removing barriers and burdens placed on families that limit their ability to access life-saving treatments, the best and only hope for a cure for their child is the goal Kids Beating Cancer accomplishes every day.
Kids Beating Cancer is a champion for these special children and their families, who only want what every parent wants: their child to be healthy, to beat cancer, and for the family to survive the long journey to a cure.
The heart of our mission: saving children’s lives.
Our Story
How One Boy Impacted the Lives of Thousands
The love for a child and the unspeakable sadness that comes from the loss of that child is the opening page of the Kids Beating Cancer Story. The following pages are all about how one little boy’s life has impacted over 9,000 children since 1992. Five-year-old John was not able to understand the rare and highly fatal disease with which he had been stricken. John had Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS), which had evolved into acute myeloblastic leukemia (AML), an almost universally fatal disease. His only hope for a cure was a bone marrow transplant. With no options close to home, his young mother, Margaret, had to leave Central Florida to seek treatment at a pediatric transplant center in Seattle, Washington. With slim chance for survival, the next four years consisted of hospital rooms, painful treatments and two bone marrow transplants. A cure was not to be; John was nine years old when he died.
John was not able to beat his disease, but the battle has continued for others like John, who deserve a chance at a cure. The John Voight Memorial Foundation, Inc. was established in 1992, just six months after John’s death, based on two objectives: to provide transplant treatment for children close to home without compromising the quality of care and to support the families throughout the journey. In 1996, the name was changed to Kids Beating Cancer, Inc.
The vision that inspired years of tenacious, unwavering effort was culminated in the opening of the Kids Beating Cancer Pediatric Transplant Center at AdventHealth for Children in Orlando in 2012, an 8-bed state-of-the-art facility.
Margaret Guedes, CEO, President and Founder
The desire every parent prays for, a cure, and the hope for a family to stay intact throughout the long treatment process was born from one little boy’s question, “Mommy why do kids get leukemia?” Today, John’s question still can’t be answered, but the outcome of the efforts in his memory is changing thousands of children’s lives, offering them access to a cure without traveling far from home, at the Kids Beating Cancer Pediatric Transplant Center.
Because all a family should worry about is keeping their child alive!
