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Scott Riccio Founder and Executive Director Accelerate Progress Director@AccelerateProgress.org www.accelerateprogress.org
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Scott Riccio

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Scott is a husband to his soulmate and inspiration, a father to two beautiful children, a son to amazing parents, and a 'little' brother.

Scott founded Accelerate Progress because even at a young age, he's lost far too many family and friends to cancer and other life-threatening diseases and he realized that too few of these cherished lives even knew how close they were to new therapies that might have saved them or provided precious additional time with loved ones.

They didn't know they were fighting an incredibly inefficient system at the same time as they fought their diseases. Scott knows that Congress, when it passed the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 and created an "accelerated approval" pathway for therapies aimed at late-stage cancer patients and others, intended for these patients to get faster, more efficient access to those therapies. Congress asked the FDA to broaden its mission from simply "protecting" the public from unsafe drugs to "promoting" public health by more promptly and efficiently delivering access to new options for patients.

Unfortunately, an out of date regulatory system only makes it harder for new therapies to reach the market, delaying new options for patients with no time for delays, "protecting" patients from "potential" effects and choosing to offer them, in many cases, the almost certainty of death to their disease instead of access to a new promising and potentially lifesaving therapy.

Accelerate Progress was created to be the necessary independent expert that could bring together the many constituencies affected by our drug-to-patient "system" while remaining beholden to none in order to be able to drive meaningful progress for all.

Scottt also works as Director of Foundation and Endowment Services at Morningstar Associates, reaching out to not-for-profits to help them build, manage, and oversee their investment portfolios in a way that will help each of them maximize their chances of being able to fund desired initiatives while building the overall grant-making power of the portfolio over time.

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SHARE More Sharing        Thursday, January 29, 2009
Accelerating Progress Against Cancer: Randy Pausch and Anna Tomalis, R.I.P. An analysis of the problems fostered by our drug-to-patient system as it exists today. Motivates the need to modernize the discovery, development, and regulatory processes in order to truly accelerate progress against cancer and other life-threatening disease. A process that regularly takes 12-15 years and costs over $1 billion does not serve the public well and can be improved with the scientific tools of the 21st century.
SHARE More Sharing        Friday, November 9, 2007
Are Congress and the FDA missing the big picture? A call to action for Congress and the public to demand public hearings on FDA delays and denials of promising and potentially lifesaving new therapies for cancer. Patients are dying every day and each therapy delayed costs far more lives than any caused by the potentially unsafe drugs that were approved.

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