Coal miners used to carry small cages with canaries deep into the mineshaft as an early warning system. If the birds keeled over, it indicated the presence of toxic gas and a clear signal that it was time to get out.

It is that same idea of early detection that led the former Silicon Valley executive Don Listwin to name his organization the Canary Foundation. There are plenty of foundations that fund cancer research, but the Canary Foundation is a bit unusual in its focus on finding biomarkers that could be used to develop diagnostics to detect cancer. The hope is the research the foundation funds will lead to the development of simple blood tests that will be able to detect cancer at its earliest stages when it is most treatable.

The San Jose-based foundation has joined with Stanford University School of Medicine to establish the Center of Excellence for Cancer Early Detection. Canary has committed $7.5 million to fund the center and Stanford's Department of Radiology has matched that with a $4 million commitment.

"This center of excellence will allow several investigators to focus in an area that's traditionally not funded by other mechanisms because it's more risky," said Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, the director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford and head of the new Center of Excellence. "Like everything else, if it was already done and proven and there were many case examples, then it would be incremental science and there would be a lot of funding potential for it."

The foundation's premise is simple: Survival rates improve dramatically when cancer is diagnosed early, and the disease is confined to the organ of origin. For example, since 1950, there has been a 70 percent decline in cervical cancer incidence and deaths thanks to the Pap test. Similar diagnostic tools for early detection, though, do not exist for many cancers. And for the ones that do exist, such as colonoscopy and mammogram, they are not as simple as a blood tests.

A Family Matter

Listwin's interest in funding cancer research grew out of the 2001 death of his mother from ovarian cancer. His family foundation had donated $10 million to start a center of excellence at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Through that relationship, Listwin began talking to Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell, president and director of the Fred Hutchinson, about how to best invest in cancer research. Hartwell convinced him early that detection was a big opportunity. About 96 percent of cancer research today is focused on therapeutics, the foundation notes.

At first, it's a bit strange to hear Silicon Valley mover and shaker Listwin, a former senior executive at Cisco Systems and former CEO of mobile phone browser maker Openwave, talk the talk of a cancer researcher. But while you can take the exec out of Silicon Valley, you can't take the Silicon Valley out to the exec.

"I think of early detection as a systems engineering challenge," he said. "We study things in way too many ways in silos and we don't think about the end-to-end nature of the problem."

The foundation operates as a sort of virtual institute and it focuses on getting the dozen or so labs it funds to work collaboratively. Though the foundation is small, Hartwell, who serves as the chairman of the Canary Foundation's science team, said he believes it has the opportunity to make a big impact.

Passionate Leaders

"There are a couple of models where small foundations with really passionate leaders who get involved in the science itself have had great impact way beyond its financial means," said Hartwell. Hartwell pointed to the Hereditary Disease Foundation started by a family with a history of Huntington's disease and developed the first method for cloning disease genes. Another example is the Fanconia Anemia Research Fund. The fund was responsible to identifying all eight genes for susceptibility to the disease, which leads to a failure of the bone marrow.

"Both of those foundations had very little resources themselves, but just went out and raised money and were able to get scientists around a table working collaboratively and passionately," he said. "That's what Don brings to this too."

Listwin is confident that the foundation's work will produce at least one set of validated biomarkers for a blood test and molecular diagnostic for one cancer, most likely ovarian cancer, by the end of this decade. That he thinks will open the door to brining in more money to advance such research.

"We're going to have one where we can say to the world, 'Hey, this works,' get it validated, and get bigger funding sources more interested," he said. "Ultimately, my goal is by the next decade to get the venture community to say 'Hey, I can make some money with this.'"