Share Your Heart - background info

Peter Augustini’s wife, Jodi Buerger, is fighting an aggressive form of breast cancer, and he’s not letting her fight it alone. During the holiday season, Augustini noticed snowflakes sold via an Ebay auction, raising thousands for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. So, when he decided he wanted to help Dana-Farber help his wife and others fighting her type of breast cancer, the Her-2 neu, also referred to as Her-2 positive, he decided on hearts to go along with the next approaching holiday: Valentine’s Day.

“A lot of people have mixed feelings about the holiday,” Augustini said, which is often criticized as a largely commercially contrived holiday. “This is a chance to do something meaningful,” he said.

The chance Augustini offers is the opportunity to purchase a three inch wooden heart for your Valentine via the Share your Heart fundraiser, with the proceeds benefiting a fund specifically set up to fund research into a cure for the Her-2 neu form of breast cancer. The hearts are sold one for $2, a package of 10 for $10 and a package of 25 for $20. The hearts come unpainted and ready to decorate or paint any way you’d like, said Wendy Friend, a friend of the family who has lent her marketing skills to the effort. Friend said she was thrilled when Augustini invited her to help with the fund-raiser. “When Jodi was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I said, ‘Oh, my God, what can I do to help?" Since Dana-Farber’s fundraising policies limit fundraisers via retail to those that raise at least $50,000, Friend said, they’re distributing the hearts through the three elementary schools: Dale, Wheelock and Memorial, which will post flyers on the fundraiser on their web sites.

Already, Augustini said, Augustini and Jodi’s children, Charles, 10, Caroline, 7 and Max, 2, are decorating their own hearts to get in the spirit for Valentine’s Day. “Instead of going to CVS and buying Snoopy Valentines, people can buy 20-25 wooden hearts,” Friend said, that will also aid breast cancer research.

The research, Augustini said, involves work on a drug called herceptin, which is attracted to specific proteins found only in cancer cells in the body. According to Dana-Farber, mapping of the human genome and advances in interpreting genetic material have led to the discovery that breast cancer is actually a family of diseases, each with unique clinical features. Armed with that knowledge, researchers have begun targeting specific forms of breast cancer. Jodi’s type of cancer is, according to Dana-Farber, is characterized by the presence of extra copies of the HER-2 oncogene (a gene that causes cancerous growth) in the cell's nucleus and an excessive amount of HER-2 protein on the surface of the cell, to which a specific cancer killing drug, herceptin, is drawn. Once herceptin comes into contact with a cancer cell, it kills the cancer, Augustini said, but after a while, the drug stops killing the cancer cells, though it continues to seek them out. Now, he said, Dr. Eric Winer, a researcher with Dana-Farber, is bonding chemotherapy drugs to herceptin, so the combination will still seek out and kill the Her-2 neu cancer.

Jodi was diagnosed with the cancer about 2 and a half years ago, Augustini said, just after the birth of their third child. She’s doing well, he said, and has been through a few treatments with Dana- Farber already. Augustini said now Jodi is being treated with the experimental herceptin-chemotherapy combination. According to Nancy Lin, M.D., one of Jodi's oncologists at Dana-Farber, Jodi was the first person at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute enrolled in a clinical trial of the herceptin-chemotherapy combination. Currently, however, there is one other patient at Dana-Farber now involved in this study. Jodi has been on the trial since October 2006. Hopefully, Augustini said, the drug could help save the lives of anyone with the Her-2 neu form of breast cancer, he said. With luck, he said, Jodi will be the first.