WeSearch connects donors to medical researchers to fund solutions

When Marquette resident Amy Rovin expressed frustration about feeling helpless over the cancer diagnosis of a close friend, her son Chris was listening. Talk about medical issues was common in the Rovin household, but this really struck home.

 

Chris Rovin is the son of a nurse and a physician, so solving medical problems is usual conversation over the family dinner table. The suffering of his mother's friend caught his attention, but even more that his mother wanted to help in some way, perhaps give a meaningful donation to relevant research, and couldn't find a way to do it.

 

"That was my first reason for coming up with the idea of WeSearch," says Rovin. "There were two more. Reason two was the inefficiency of most charities. People donate money and don't realize that their donation is going almost entirely toward administrative costs. Only about 20 percent might actually go to research. The third reason was that most research funding requests go unfunded. When I looked into it, out of about 68,000 research fund requests in one year, 55,000 of those went unfunded."

 

So was born the passion for, and the idea of, WeSearch, a nonprofit organization to connect donors directly with medical researchers. WeSearch opened for donations in October 2011. Chris Rovin is executive director and co-founder, with Guillaume Curaudeau, a college friend he met while at University of Michigan majoring in history. 

 

Rovin is still in college, now attending Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and working on his master's in business administration while keeping close watch on WeSearch.

 

"WeSearch lists medical research being conducted through universities," he explains. "Donors can search for a research project that they feel will be beneficial and help fund it. In return, researchers update donors on research progress. Our 501(c)3 status was approved in 2012, so all donations are tax deductible."

 

Not only tax deductible, Rovin stresses, but every dollar goes directly to research and only research. "We look for sponsors to cover our administrative costs in exchange for ad space. We want our donors to know exactly where their money goes. The name WeSearch was chosen to convey that collective effort."

 

Someone else was listening at the Rovin dinner table. Chris Rovin's father, Richard Rovin, is a neurosurgeon at Marquette General Hospital. He also oversees some of the research projects WeSearch donors are funding for Upper Michigan Brain Tumor Center, or UMBTC, a collaboration between Marquette General Hospital and Northern Michigan University.

 

The UMBTC is led by Rovin along with Robert Winn, Ph. D.,  a professor of biology at NMU, and John Lawrence, Ph. D, the UMBTC's post-doctoral fellow.

 

"UMBTC is funded by WeSearch and by our one annual fundraising event called Hope Starts Here," says the elder Rovin. "There are families struggling in the U.P. who can't travel to Ann Arbor or elsewhere for the medical care they need, so we feel a responsibility to offer state-of-the-art care for patients dealing with brain tumors here in Marquette."

 

Lab research projects currently requesting funding through WeSearch include a study of the leptin-epinephrine connection in brain tumors and how that connection may lead to killing tumor cells; drug resistance in breast cancer patients; development of a phone app to help diagnose concussions in athletes; and others. Updates on all the projects are posted on the website along with videos to explain the research underway.

 

"Every one of our board members has been personally touched by cancer themselves or in their families," says Chris Rovin. The WeSearch directors are Michael Kettner, Danielle Beverly and Susan Wideman Schaible. "In fact, my mother's friend with the cancer diagnosis went into remission and is now on our board."

 

"It's important to realize the quality of work that is being done right here in the Upper Peninsula," adds Dr. Rovin. "WeSearch is the perfect fit, another avenue of funding for these studies, but also a way to build a closer relationship with patients and families. We occasionally have an open house in the UMBTC lab so that people can come in and look at their cells through microscopes. And for the researchers, it's a reminder that those cells belong to real people."

 

According to the American Cancer Society, about 1,660,290 new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed in 2013, and in 2013 about 580,350 Americans are projected to die of cancer, almost 1,600 people a day. Cancer remains the second most common cause of death in the U.S., accounting for nearly one of every four deaths.

 

"We want people to feel directly involved, not helpless," says Chris Rovin. "Research takes a long time, but without funding, research stops. You never know where the next big break will happen." 

Zinta Aistars is creative director for Z Word, LLC, and editor of the literary magazine, The Smoking Poet. She lives on a farm in Hopkins.