THE ORAL CANCER FOUNDATION IS A NATIONAL PUBLIC SERVICE, NON-PROFIT ENTITY DESIGNED TO REDUCE SUFFERING AND SAVE LIVES THROUGH PREVENTION, EDUCATION, RESEARCH, ADVOCACY, AND SUPPORT ACTIVITIES. Mission Statement The Oral Cancer Foundation’s missions are rooted in science. OCF funds life-saving research and work that elucidates mechanisms for early discovery and furthers disease understanding. We provide direct peer to peer support for oral cancer patients and their caregivers. We disseminate vetted professional and public information on oral and oropharyngeal cancer, and work as advocates for national policies that facilitate disease awareness, early discovery, and improve treatments and their outcomes. Our foundation’s missions are changing patient’s lives today, and altering outcomes in the future.

There are real world mechanisms to reduce the incidence or oral and oropharyngeal cancers, we are not waiting on a new medical discovery to make this possible. This cancer is discoverable in a visual and tactile screening that takes less than ten minutes. I can be found by individuals in the dental community and ent community readily. Even people from the general public can self exam with a simple set of directions we teach them to become engaged in the self discovery and self refferal of suspect tissues, that when presented to a medical professional may be eliminated to prevent further progression as a precancerous or very early stage one carcinoma in situ. There is a vaccine for young people that will prevent the primary cause of oropharyngeal cancers that has been approved for use and highly successful since 2006. A world where this killer has far less impact is possible through these simple behavior changes of avoiding risk factors and existing screening technologies.

Source: Nonprofit submitted responses

Goal One: Expand our screening and obtain more involvement from the dental industry (more than 100k dental professionals). This can have a huge impact on early discovery and education of risk factor avoidance

Goal Type: Grow, expand, scale or increase access to the existing programs and services.

Goal Two: We have national public screening clinics we can expand given funding to do so. We will engage in more vaccination education for HPV in young adults to eliminate viral cause oropharyngeal cancers.

Goal Type: This goal reflects our commitment to further our advocacy work for our organization and or cause area.

Goal Three: Taking better advantage of our relationships and positions inside NIH, NIDCR, and NCI we can have a greater impact as advocates for key clinical trials to be engaged in.

Goal Type: This goal reflects our commitment to further our advocacy work for our organization and or cause area.

Describe an investment in leadership

We have had staff trained in HPV causes of our disease and with the help of the CDC developed in house education programs for all those who come in contact with the pubic and dental professionals to encourage more buy in to early effective vaccination.

This organization mobilizes for mission in the following ways:

• Strategic Partnerships

• Thought Leadership

• Raising Awareness

• Policy Advocacy

What are this organization’s external mobilizaton efforts?

OCF has partnered with other non profits and professional societies such as the Academy of Oral Medicine, The Academy of Oral Pathology and the Public Health Foundation to produce programs together in both early discovery of oral cancers, and advancing adoption of simple early discovery techniques and technologies from simple visual and tactile screening, to the use of tissue autoflouresence to aid in early discovery. OCF is an active advocate through our positions on oversight committees at the NCI and NIDCR for the most promising new research to get visibility and endorsements for funding. OCF has a robust presence in social media reaching out to patients survivors and the general public to advance our objectives. The Founder of OCF is a frequent lecturer at university programs and professional society meeting on topics as diverse as HPV conversion of cells to malignancy, and immunotherapies, from patient selection to mechanisms of action such as immune check point inhibition.

In a year of Covid where the attention is focused on the virus rather than cancers, we engaged in virtual events both to raise awareness and educate professionals and patients on new ideas that in our sequestered situation they may not have been aware of. The adoption of remote working and virtual outreach and education was a necessary change in how OCF operate. For us this has been an over all positive change, as we have greatly expanded our reach and impact through very low cost mechanisms of virtual meetings and podcasting which we did not engage in prior to covid.