Held September 12 & 13, 2015 at Hillsboro Stadium

1st Place: Blaze Gold

Runner-up: Stealth Fastpitch Snyder

Congratulations to the 2015 Fastpitch Cares All-Tournament Team!

Emma Gordon – Blaze Gold
Kennedy Santzi – Stealth Fastpitch Snyder
Hannah Galey – Nightmare
Briana Harvill – Illusion
Meagan Bratcher – Black Widows
Ashton Phillips
Jessica Vice – Oregon Thunder
Raeyly Clemer – Stealth Fastpitch 16U
Abbey McCarthy – Rip City
Alexis Morrison – Oregon Extreme
Jordan Fimes – Rip City
Charlotte Royal – Vancouver Ice
Kalyna Koro – Blast
Alyssa Duran – NW Wild
Brianna Vire – Blaze Ohana
Secret Shero – Roots Academy
Andrea Hoey
Brionna Gereb – Blaze Deos
Catriona McKay – Silver Bullets
Christina Mukalla – Rogue Waves

Thank you to all who participated and supported our fundraising efforts through the 2015 Fastpitch Cares Tournament!

Fastpitch Cares presented a check in the amount of $23,200 to Dr. Monika Davare to purchase an imaging machine for use by all of the pediatric cancer biology and hematology researchers in the Papé Pediatric Research Institute at OHSU Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.

Below is a brief description of the ChemiDoc Touch Gel Imaging System, from  Dr. Monika Davare

What is the reach? / How many patients would this potentially help?

  • The imager would be used by all the pediatric cancer biology and hematology researchers in the Pape Pediatric Research Institute (7th floor). These group of physician-scientists and scientists are actively involved in research and development efforts to identify more effective therapies for children with cancer (brain cancer (glioma, glioblastoma & medulloblastoma), sarcoma, neuroblastoma, and leukemia). In addition, researchers are working on bone marrow failure disorders and Fanconi syndrome. Given this reach, we anticipate that this tool will in the short run (for some projects) and the long run (for others) impact treatment of children with these types of cancers. I would estimate that it has the potential to impact treatment decisions and strategies for thousands of patients in the long run.

How does the machine help your research?

  • We do extensive pre-clinical anti-cancer drug testing on both cells that have been genetically engineered to mimic patients tumor cells as well as patient-dervied cancer cells. The goal of the drug testing is to match effective pharmaceutical agent to the unique cancer-driver in that particular tumor to enable personalized therapy. A lot of our work is with FDA approved agents or with drugs that are currently in Phase I or Phase II trials on the adult oncology side. In addition to doing “kill curves”, stringent pre-clinical and post-clinical validation requires experimental proof that the effect of the drug is due to “on-target”, hypothesized block rather than unspecific, “off-target” effect. For this we do immunoblotting. The imager is instrumental part of our work flow for immunoblotting (amounts to about 8-10 hours of imaging time/week) and currently we are scraping by using another machine on a different floor that also gets heavy use. In short, this machine will streamline our work flow, maximize the use of our time to be used for critical experiments.