Every week I sit down to write this and I think: how is it possible that people this committed exist in the world, and how did I get lucky enough to know them? This week’s three advocates were all on the road — at summits, at conferences, in rooms where the future of cancer care is being shaped — and they brought everything they had. That’s the job. That’s the calling. Let me introduce you to them.
Elise Roth Tedeschi | LinkedIn
Elise is a Patient Research Advocate on the NCI Pancreatic Task Force, and this week she was on a panel at PanCAN’s Scientific Summit in San Diego. She came home fired up — about new trials, about early detection tests that could genuinely change the prognosis curve for pancreatic cancer, which remains one of the most brutal diagnoses anyone can receive. Elise doesn’t just sit in these rooms. She shapes what happens in them. And she has a line that I want printed on a poster and hung in every research institution in the country: “How can you design a car without ever driving one?” That’s the whole argument for patient involvement in research, said better than I’ve ever heard it. When patients are at the table, the science gets better. The trials get smarter. The questions being asked are the right ones. Elise is proof of that. Follow her on LinkedIn and watch what she’s doing, she is moving the needle on one of the cancers that most urgently needs it.
Mark Moore | LinkedIn
Mark Moore spent his weekend at the Fight Colorectal Cancer Research Advocacy Summit in Springfield, Missouri, surrounded by colorectal cancer research advocates from across the country. As someone who has spent a lot of time in those kinds of rooms, I know what they cost — the travel, the time away from family and work, the mental and emotional bandwidth it takes to stay engaged and keep learning. Mark does it anyway, because he’s the co-founder of Ole Creek Health, and because he knows that what he learns in Springfield becomes action back home in Durham. Closing screening gaps is the mission, and it’s not abstract to him, it’s neighborhoods and people and lives. His reminder this week is one I’ll never stop amplifying: if you are 45 or older, please talk to your doctor about getting screened for colorectal cancer. That conversation takes five minutes. It can save your life. Mark is the kind of advocate who makes you want to be better at this work. Go connect with him.
Lou Lanza | LinkedIn
Lou Lanza is a survivor, an advocate, and a mechanical engineer — which means he brings both his lived experience and his systems-thinking brain to everything he does. This week he drove from South Jersey to Detroit for three full days at the Society for Integrative Oncology’s 2026 International Conference. He is part of SIO’s Patient Advocate Special Interest Group, which works to ensure that patients have a real voice in evidence-based supportive care — the kind of care that addresses the whole person, not just the tumor. That matters enormously. It matters to quality of life. It matters to survivorship. But here is the detail that made me laugh out loud when I read his post: Lou brought his famous pizzelles. Homemade Italian wafer cookies, apparently, are an elite-level networking strategy. Everyone in that conference hall now knows Lou Lanza, and honestly, that’s how advocacy works too — you show up, you bring something of yourself, and you make people want to keep talking to you. Lou did all of that.
That’s Vol. 18. Three advocates, three cities, one shared conviction that showing up matters.
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