The National Lung Cancer Partnership is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to decreasing deaths due to lung cancer, and helping patients live longer and better, through research, awareness and advocacy. Founded in 2001 as Women Against Lung Cancer, the organization changed its name to National Lung Cancer Partnership in 2006 to better reflect the partnership we have forged with physicians, researchers, lung cancer survivors and their families, advocacy organizations and the media to help achieve our mission. We are ultimately working to advance lung cancer treatments for all patients, but we are currently focusing our efforts on women.

Why Women?

• American women do not recognize that lung cancer is a woman’s disease. Even though lung cancer kills over 30,000 more women than breast cancer annually in the U.S, lung cancer is not on most women’s radar screens. Because of women’s misperceptions of their risk of dying from lung cancer, they are less likely to see their doctors to discuss what can be done to decrease their risks of getting and dying from this dreadful disease. We can change this by letting women know that lung cancer is their top cancer killer.
• There are differences between how men and women get lung cancer, what happens when they get it, and how they respond to treatment. We believe if we can understand those differences, we will make great progress towards understanding how to tackle lung cancer. We are the only lung cancer organization working to advance this goal.
• Women are the major decision-makers in health care in the U.S. Women also have proven to be powerful agents of change, as Million Mom’s, Mother’s Against Drunk Driving, and Breast Cancer Advocates. By forming collaborations with other women’s health, lung cancer, and general cancer organizations, we can mobilize women as a force for health care change to demand increased funding for lung cancer research and awareness of the disease.

What We Do

Our goals are to:

1. Raise awareness of the deadly impact of the disease upon both women and men
2. Increase funding for lung cancer research
3. Improve patient care by educating and empowering patients and healthcare professionals

We are achieving our goals by:

• Funding research to increase our understanding of how lung cancer starts and progresses, and how better to detect and treat it.
• Providing travel grants to major scientific and medical conventions for survivors, patient advocates and trainees to allow them to improve their lung cancer knowledge base and network with other advocates and professionals.
• Performing educational outreach to physicians, allied health professionals, and patients and their families.
• Hosting lung cancer awareness events.
• Using all possible pathways to advocate for increases in funding for lung cancer research.

The statistics are dramatic, the odds are overwhelming and the need to change the status of lung cancer in the U.S. grows more urgent each day. Please help us effect change!