Real estate executive Mike Fallon wasn’t a cyclist or a Dana-Farber donor when David Fialkow invited him to a fundraising dinner for the Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC) in the spring of 2022. By the time the event was over, however, he had made a financial commitment to the Institute and had decided to take part in the next PMC with his father, Joseph, founder of The Fallon Company.
“This all happened over the course of a few hours,” he said, explaining how moved he’d been when Dana-Farber’s Cigall Kadoch, PhD, shared news of her research into a misguided gene regulator that makes some childhood cancers resistant to treatment. “I was so excited by the promise of her work and her enthusiasm. I thought, I may not understand all of this, but if I have any kind of instinct about people who are onto something—she was onto something.”
Fallon, who is CEO of The Fallon Company, directed a portion of his gift to Kadoch’s research, which advances one of The Dana-Farber Campaign’s key priorities: epigenetics, the study of changes in how genetic material is read and processed by the cell, rather than changes in the DNA itself. Dana-Farber researchers are at the forefront of revolutionary research into how to block or reverse these changes, while playing a lead role in FDA approval of the first-ever epigenetic drug to treat solid tumors.