Blacklegged Tick. Source: Jerzy Górecki, no changes made.
Bay Area Lyme Foundation and Project Lyme, two organizations committed to halting the course of Lyme disease, came together to highlight the need for collaboration in the fight against Lyme disease during the inaugural 2018 Lyme Gala.
The collaboration aims to improve awareness, education and research of Lyme and other tick-borne infections, which can potentially be disabling, and even life-threatening.
Bay Area Lyme Foundation, founded in 2011, is a national non-profit organization committed to making Lyme disease easy to diagnose and simple to cure, is the leading public not-for-profit sponsor of innovative Lyme disease research in the USA.
Based in Silicon Valley, Bay Area Lyme collaborates with world-class scientists and institutions to accelerate medical breakthroughs for Lyme disease. It is also dedicated to providing reliable, fact-based information so that prevention and the importance of early treatment are common knowledge.
A pivotal donation from The Laurel Foundation covers all overhead costs and allows for 100% of all donor contributions to Bay Area Lyme Foundation to go directly to research and prevention programs.
Founded in 2016, headquartered in Rockport, Maine, Project Lyme is a global non-profit organization dedicated to the awareness, prevention and early diagnosis of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. Project Lyme’s mission is to eradicate the epidemic of tick-borne diseases through awareness and education, support of cutting-edge science, and advocacy for solutions to end the suffering.
With Bay Area Lyme Foundation’s expertise in working with scientists and institutions to implement valuable research, develop impactful educational programs and create novel initiatives such as the Lyme Disease Biobank, and Project Lyme’s focus on increasing awareness and improving education, these organizations hope to one day make Lyme and other tick-borne diseases easy to diagnose and simple to cure.
Among the attendees at this years’ Gala event were renowned Bay Area Lyme Foundation funded researchers and clinicians who are on the front lines fighting the battle against Lyme disease on a daily basis, including Richard Horowitz, MD and Steven Phillips, MD, as well as an array of celebrities.
Event sponsors included: Cahill Gordon & Reindel, Cooley Law LLP, First Republic Bank, General Atlantic Foundation, Jefferies Financial, Newmarket Knight, Oak Hill Advisors, Sage Foundation, Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, Whittier Trust.
The funds raised will support the efforts of Bay Area Lyme Foundation and Project Lyme equally. More than $200,000 of the total funds raised at the event were earmarked specifically for therapeutic research; 100% of these funds will go directly to researchers as with all funds donated to Bay Area Lyme Foundation.
“Lyme disease is the most important health crisis of our time,” … “This disease demands that we recruit and fund the best medical minds to fund a cure, and I am hopeful of the efforts in the collaboration between Project Lyme and Bay Area Lyme Foundation toward this goal.” – Bill Ford, CEO, General Atlantic.
“Lyme disease is challenging to diagnose and impossible to cure for many Americans with currently available therapies, and we need more research to understand how to best battle tick-borne diseases.” … “Clinicians need to support one another, researchers need to exchange information and more organizations like these need to come together to make this critical research possible.” – Keynote speaker Neil Spector, MD, an oncologist at Duke University School of Medicine
Sources:
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bay-area-lyme-foundation-and-project-lyme-join-forces-to-fight-lyme-disease-at-the-2018-lyme-gala-300746745.html
- https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bay-area-lyme-foundation#section-overview
- https://projectlyme.org/contact-us-2/
