“Cancer research is not a zero-sum game… in curing prostate cancer with gene-based treatments, you’re talking about finishing off 73% of other cancers.”
Dr. Jonathan Simons is the president and CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) which focuses on research and resources for a disease that 1 in 9 American men will be diagnosed with and claims 34k lives per year.
Except for skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men. After his own prostate cancer diagnosis, Michael Milken was central in changing the equation around research and medical advancements through his invention of venture philanthropy. The rapid growth of investment and philanthropic partnerships with biotech and pharma has seen amazing progress in detection and treatments. “[Since that work began,] there has been a 53% reduction in the death rate from prostate cancer, the largest decrease in death rate of any of the major cancers.”
57% percent of prostate cancer runs in families, making it the most inherited of the major cancers and highlighting the need to be aware of family history. This is especially important among black men who are twice as likely to die from the disease. There are even greater breakthroughs on the near horizon in the fight against prostate cancer using gene-based treatments. These advanced treatments would also offer the ability to eliminate over 70% of other cancers.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Dr. Jonathan Simons
Chief Executive Officer
Prostate Cancer Foundation
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone. And welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series that we launched during 2020 with leading investors, creators and thinkers. And our goal on these SALT Talks is the same as our goal at our SALT conference series, which is to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. We have another great talk focused on community impact and philanthropy and science today. And when we can find that intersection, that's really the sweet spot that we'd like to cover here on SALT Talks.
John Darsie: (00:54)
And our guest today is Dr. Jonathan Simons. Dr. Simons is the president and chief operating officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, PCF, which was founded in 1993, and it focuses on research and resources for a disease that one in nine American men will be diagnosed with in their lifetimes, and which also claims 34,000 lives each year. Just as a quick personal anecdote, my father had prostate cancer and was cured and has lived many years beyond that. So thankful for the work of Dr. Simons and his team at the Prostate Cancer Foundation on that piece.
John Darsie: (01:32)
But the fight is personal to Jonathan as well who is the husband, son and grandson of cancer survivors. He's board certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. He received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and did his residency at Boston's Mass General, as well as a clinical fellowship in medical oncology at Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. Before joining PCF in 2007, he was the distinguished service professor of hematology and oncology at Emory University School of Medicine, my alma mater, and professor of biomedical engineering and material sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech.
John Darsie: (02:12)
Dr. Simons is the founding director of Emory's Winship Cancer Institute and co-director of the National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence at Emory and Georgia Tech. Hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm, and he's also the chairman of SALT. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:37)
John, thank you. And Dr. Simons, thanks for being here. You mentioned cancer and cancer survivorship. It's obviously all very personal. Your grandfather survived. I believe your dad was one of the first people treated at the National Cancer Institute for Lymphoma and was cured or put into remission. Your wife is a cancer survivor. My wife is actually a cancer survivor. She had bladder cancer at the young age of 21, which was sort of hard to believe, but they say it was related to drinking water around the Love Canal, where she had gone to school up in University of Buffalo. So we have cancer in our lives, unfortunately. Just about everybody listening has a cancer story. Tell us about the journey that brought you to your cancer research.
Jonathan Simons: (03:27)
Well, my story, like so many stories, is not that unusual. One in three American families will experience cancer, and I'm glad John, your dad's doing well and I'm glad Anthony, your wife's doing well. But what was formative for me is, my father was cured after relapsing several times from Hodgkin's Disease on a clinical trial. So as a kid interested in science, if I couldn't make it to the Major League Baseball career, and I thought basically cancer research was heroic, because I literally saw the curability of the incurable illness unfold in our lives. And my father recurred several times. So he faced an existential threat.
Jonathan Simons: (04:22)
But I think that's a story that so many families can tell in different ways. But that's really mine, so I was interested in being a doctor and a cancer scientist in developing new treatment and got very interested in prostate cancer as a consequence of a baseball coach who got prostate cancer before there was a blood test to detect it and who succumbed in under 12 months of diagnosis. So I got interested in prostate cancer because I was interested in seeing prostate cancer go the way of Hodgkin's disease, which went from incurable to curable.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:01)
This is an interesting disease. I'd like you to lay it out for people. It's obviously a male disease. Breast cancer is probably 97% women, but there's a small percentage of men that also get breast cancer. But yet this is a male disease. Treatable. We have way more understanding of it as a result of your research. So take us back to 1993 when you were awarded, as a scientist and a doctor, you were awarded a research grant from the Prostate Cancer Foundation. What were you researching then? Where are we today? Build the continuum for us.
Jonathan Simons: (05:41)
Sure. So you're right. Prostate cancer is the most common, non-skin cancer in men, and basically one in eight men, and actually one in six black men will get prostate cancer in their lifetime. Even though now, if caught early, the ten-year survival for prostate cancer is 98%. But in 1993, it was woefully behind. Given the amount of it and basically the public perception, it was a disease of old men. It took somebody to change the equation. And that was a 40 year old man named Michael Milken, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer, told he was terminally ill. He sounded pretty good on the phone yesterday. And he said, "I'm going to change the course of medical history and accelerate work on this cancer." And really, Mike invented, as we now really understand it, entrepreneurial or venture philanthropy for cancer research, but basically used every relationship he had, used his entire Rolodex in order to try to assemble partnerships between philanthropic support, biotech and pharma investment, and a significant government investment to basically deliver new treatments and better detection.
Jonathan Simons: (07:14)
And really, if you're looking at return on investment, and I know your viewers are interested in ROI in a lot of things, there's been, since Mike was diagnosed, a 53% reduction in the death rate from prostate cancer. And John, your dad's a part of the story, right? That's the largest decrease, absolute decrease in death rate in any of the major cancers. And that's a consequence of a heavy investment in research, public awareness and partnerships. But we must still do better. An African-American man is still twice as likely to die of this disease as a white man in the United States. And for every man and his family, we have the opportunity in this decade to really put prostate cancer in the rear view mirror as a major public health threat. But prostate cancer hasn't stopped in the pandemic and neither has a prostate cancer research in our foundation.
Anthony Scaramucci: (08:16)
Tell us about ways men need to think about it. How do they potentially prevent it? Michael Milken obviously has come to our SALT events. He's spoken many times. Once in Singapore, a few times in Las Vegas. He's always talking about nutrition, Dr. Simons. Tell us a little bit about what men can do to protect themselves. Obviously the PSA tests, et cetera, but give us a portfolio of things that people can do.
Jonathan Simons: (08:45)
There are three things that a man could do. They can talk to their family about risk, because in the same way put on seat belts because there's a risk of a car accident, they can talk about risk, they can get screened. I can talk more about that. And they can really take charge of the future of their health. And the way to do that is assume that you're very likely to get the disease and you'd rather live into your nineties and not die from it.
Jonathan Simons: (09:20)
Second, it's 57% of prostate cancer runs in families. It's actually the most inherited of the major cancers. So at 40, if you have a prostate cancer running in your family, not only do you need to be get checked, you need to be checked at 40. And certainly if you're, African-American, given the fact that you have a higher lifetime risk of getting the disease, you need to take charge of your health once a year, and basically have a conversation with your doctor at 40 if the disease is running your family. At 45, if you're African-American. And we believe at 50, if you're of European descent.
Jonathan Simons: (10:06)
Those are the three things. And basically, prostate cancer is to men as breast cancer is to women, we just have to assume far more family interest in our health as men, as women do, in caring for families and caring for themselves.
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:26)
When you look back, is there anything in the prostate cancer research that you've done that has led to transformations in the research of other cancers?
Jonathan Simons: (10:41)
Yeah, I'm grateful for that question because it's a really important one. The discovery of checkpoint inhibitors that have made melanoma curable. It extended the lives ... In the Superbowl, you hear about treatment for lung cancer using the immune system. That discovery was made by James Alison and won a Nobel prize, but was originally funded, first real foundation support was from the Prostate Cancer Foundation, asking the question, "How can you turn the immune system on against prostate cancer?"
Jonathan Simons: (11:13)
So in fact, we've delivered 13 FDA approved drugs, which have significantly extended the survivability of prostate cancer over the years with 800 million in R&D that our foundations invested. But we've really pushed forward, rather profoundly, progress in over 11 other cancers. And cancer search is just not a zero sum game, particularly as we've come to understand how genes work. And right now we're really prosecuting research on new drugs that target prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, cancer through a gene called [Wint 00:11:56] pancreatic cancer, colon cancer.
Jonathan Simons: (11:59)
And in fact, in curing prostate cancer with these new genomic or gene based medicines, you're really curing prostate cancer by making these new precision medicines, you're really talking about finishing off 73 other forms of human cancer, including childhood brain tumors. One of the things that my community doesn't do very well is market itself, because it's much more interesting to talk nerd to nerd about how interesting these genes are. But fundamentally, this revolution and understanding how genes work through the human genome and then making medicines against genes that are rogue and abhorrent, and a cancer means that cancer is no longer just anatomic. Cancer care isn't just where the cancer came from. It's genomic. It's making medicines against the genes.
Jonathan Simons: (12:53)
And in the next few years, we're going to see extraordinary progress. This isn't Pollyannish, in basically making new classes of medicines that are going to treat the genomics, not the anatomics. So we'll see FDA approvals, not so much based on did the tumor come from the breast or the bladder or the prostate, but against really the Achilles heel, the genetic Achilles heels of these tumors.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:23)
Let's talk about the money raising aspect of this and how important it is to your research. And give us a sense for who is underwriting cancer research today. Is it mostly private citizens and foundations and drug companies? Is the government also in there? What does the mix look like now in terms of the R&D going into these things?
Jonathan Simons: (13:49)
The ecosystem has three major investors and they're all vital to each other. And they're codependent if the goal is to end death and suffering from cancer. Foundations like ours can often make the higher risk, most [inaudible 00:14:07] first series A round insightful investments. Our National Institutes of Health, our National Cancer Institute, the Department of Defense invest millions in ... Maybe perhaps in thinking about validating or series B and C, or expanding on a discovery. So philanthropic support, although it's only 4% of the pie, it's some of the most essential of all the investments, because it can be more nimble and it can identify what we would call breakout opportunities, Anthony.
Jonathan Simons: (14:47)
But biopharma is essential in scale. There are extraordinary and healthy partnerships. Mike Milken and others really developed a new kind of ecosystem in the nineties and two thousands. When I started at Johns Hopkins, we were told never to go to a drug company research meeting because we were pure and they were purely profit driven. That whole culture evaporated with the excitement of university scientists and scientists, and project managers, and biopharma trying to accelerate getting a scientific development to patients.
Jonathan Simons: (15:30)
And our government, probably one of the things that our country still leads the world in, regardless of your views on American exceptionalism. Sorry, that's just the way it works right now with COVID. Regardless of your views about American exceptionalism, we've been an exceptionally generous people at funding basic research. I mean, one of our greatest exports, I think, is actually medical progress. And our National Institutes of Health, and you saw it with the development of COVID vaccines at just meteoric speed, but that meteoric speed in developing these vaccines is happening in cancer research all the time now. But NIH has just been a huge partner in the reduction of deaths as well.
Jonathan Simons: (16:31)
It doesn't mean that getting funded for a breakthrough idea is easy. It's actually harder, and it's going to be harder in the COVID economy, probably. But it's a proven ecosystem, our cancer research ecosystem. It just has lots of areas where we could still now go faster if we concentrated on solving some of the problems and choke points. And a really good example that's an African-American detection. Basically, an African-American disparity or health justice. Robert F. Smith made an enormous philanthropic commitment this year to accelerate the development of a test. You could test blood, or you could test saliva to identify African-American men, really men of West African ancestry, that have a two to 11 times higher chance of getting prostate cancer. And this whole idea of transforming even how we screen for cancer, by understanding genetics, it is built on NIH funding in trying to understand how genes work in family. But also an impatience for true health justice in trying to invest now in the actual development and testing and final really reduction to practice in communities of color.
Jonathan Simons: (17:55)
So the entrepreneurial philanthropist is still the most important part, we believe. Entrepreneurial donors, entrepreneurial biomedical research foundations, we think are still the vital driving force, where there's 10X from the government if you can move along the data.
Jonathan Simons: (18:19)
That was a long word answer. [crosstalk 00:18:21] I get cranked up on this topic because I-
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:25)
No, I let you go because it's so interesting. Our resident millennial, Dr. Simons, is dying to ask a question here. So I have to put myself on mute. Don't let him out shine me, however. They try to talk over me.
John Darsie: (18:39)
That's impossible. My IQ is not nearly high enough relative to our guest here today. But just to go back to what Anthony said, we can't give Michael Milken enough credit for the work he's done as a venture philanthropist in the field of medicine. He has done so much. I don't think people realize how much capital he's driven into the space and the outcomes that it's generated. So we're very thankful to him.
John Darsie: (19:02)
But I have a question. The New England Journal of Medicine noted last year that the pandemic threatened public health, not only because the risk of COVID, but because of its effects on patients with other diagnoses, including cancer. It could be because risks of immune compromised people visiting offices, for example. How does the data show that playing out over the past year?
Jonathan Simons: (19:26)
There's no question that we don't have all the data on how disruptive COVID-19 has been in terms of delaying the standard of cancer care. I'm sure it will be unhappy. All I can do is speak from my own small, but real practice of prostate cancer oncology, and talking to colleagues. It's slowed down getting surgery or starting radiation, just the logistics of getting patients in and out and tested because we're trying to stagger them. And what's been very challenging is, it slowed down clinical trial accrual for cancer medicines that may be breakthrough medicines or really be very, very important part of developing new therapy.
Jonathan Simons: (20:14)
But the good news is that I think cancer patients have learned that telemedicine is here and that it may be possible to develop ways of actually more efficiently and actually more compassionately interacting with patients using telemedicine on a lot of issues that, until COVID, we wouldn't have considered. The key is going to be getting herd immunity established as soon as possible so we can get further and further towards the normal patient flow. And no question, as well, cancer screening rates are down, but I don't know what they are most recently. And we're very concerned about that. And particularly in lower socioeconomic environments and communities where we're so concerned about improving cancer screening rates.
John Darsie: (21:12)
Yeah, it's the problem that obviously the COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate negative impact on communities, people of color. We talked about that with Paula Schneider of Susan G Komen, and it's rampant across a variety of different diseases and circumstances. But President Biden is arguably more dedicated to cancer research than any president that we've had in the history of the country. How optimistic are you that we could take a giant leap forward? And from a public policy standpoint, what would you like to see done that hasn't been done before, or maybe has been done, but not on a large enough scale to accelerate progress that we're making in cancer research?
Jonathan Simons: (21:52)
Well, first of all, I think you're right. I think President Biden will be the most nonpartisan or bipartisan champion of accelerating progress against cancer. And we've had some presidents that have experienced cancer and their families for certain. I worked directly with Vice President Biden and his staff on Vice President Biden's cancer moonshot. And actually, I have very specific answer. We think that our program with the Veterans Administration in delivering precision oncology. So if you're served your country first, you should be first to get cancer research breakthroughs for prostate cancer. We think that, in this administration not only will medical care and cancer care really in the Veterans Administration, but there's an opportunity to take the nation's largest health system with actually the best electronic medical record and really push forward how clinical trials are delivered, how we basically learn how to deliver precision care for all forms of cancer.
Jonathan Simons: (23:01)
And second, I think President Biden's going to be a champion of basic cancer research or basically fundamental discoveries that could bring breakthroughs in earlier detection or medicines. But also, I think this administration's going to be very interested in all the choke points.
Jonathan Simons: (23:21)
What's slowing us down? Well, the ease of letting rural Americans take place in clinical trials, or Americans in urban areas take place in clinical trials, because right now only four in a hundred Americans are taking, with cancer, even participating in a clinical trial. So even if we got that to 20%, that would be five times as fast as delivering to the FDA packages of data that show benefit.
Jonathan Simons: (23:51)
And last, I think, I think this administration is a real champion also for the important role of nursing. And our system needs to readdress, in our healthcare system, in particular, how vital for the future health of our country, nursing is, in particularly advanced practice oncology nursing. And here I am a physician scientists talking about nursing, but I think that these are going to be very positive developments.
John Darsie: (24:24)
Yeah. And how has data improved our ability to process data relevant to cancer? I feel like we talked to a lot of people in the healthcare space and they talk about how we haven't because of legitimate rules around privacy and things like that, haven't been able to sequence enough data, large enough data sets to really make huge progress. I had somebody I knew in New York, their brother was a founder of Flat Iron health, which you might be familiar with, backed by Google, acquired by Roche, that was trying to gain greater access to that data and process that data in a more effective way. Are you optimistic about breakthroughs in data processing as it relates to oncology generally?
Jonathan Simons: (25:10)
I'm aspirational and hopeful. I feel like the way we handle data in medicine is like January 1942, after Pearl Harbor, we had Navy prepared for the last war, right? We only had four aircraft carriers, even though air power was going to be the essential element for winning the war against the fascist. We all know in oncology, we all know a medical research, that the silos of data right now between the laboratory and the clinic and data scientists are woefully antiquated, given the opportunities. If you can sequence the human genome for less than one third the cost of a CAT scan, but you can't get that information to a doctor and to a pharmacist and to researchers. Just look at our challenges right now with sequencing COVID. Basically defining the genetic. This is like a surveillance problem that's trivial in terms of its genomics.
Jonathan Simons: (26:25)
But just look right now at our public health system challenges in terms of assembling data on variants. I'm hopeful that we completely reevaluate how we can protect patient privacy, but also put the patient first from the standpoint of getting the benefits of all this scientific and medical knowledge. And currently, our electronic health records are designed for reimbursement. They're not designed to ideally care for the next patient based on the science we know. So we're going to have to put patients again first in terms of how we think about big data. And we're going to need to allow data to be analyzed by all kinds of people in ways where we protect privacy.
Jonathan Simons: (27:19)
So in the long-term, I'm optimistic, but we haven't seen ... Well, there's been a lot of talk. We haven't seen a great example yet of a fully integrated health system. And again, I'm cranked up about this. That's why we're so optimistic without the Veterans Administration, actually, because they actually collect outcomes data independent of reimbursement. And I'm not saying reimbursement isn't important, but what I am saying is that we need a complete redesign in how we look at medical data and allow data scientists to make these important observations.
John Darsie: (28:05)
Well, I could ask you a lot more questions, but I'm going to turn it back over to Anthony to see if he has any final words before we let you go, Dr. Simons. So you can get back to your important work that you do every day.
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:15)
Well, my question is about the future, Doc. You seem like you're on the cusp of a lot of breakthroughs and you seem like you've helped to integrate the narrative around cancer therapies with other types of cancers through your research. So where are we five and 10 years from now if things go well? Build us an optimistic case, if you don't mind.
Jonathan Simons: (28:39)
I am optimistic based on the facts in that there'll be no clinical decision without precision. Your genes will be sequenced. The expressed RNA will be sequenced, we'll be treating the right patient with the right drug at the right time or making the right clinical decision based on an extraordinary understanding of the disease that you have that.
Jonathan Simons: (29:06)
Second, if we can solve our access to care issues, if we can solve basically the delivery of these amazing things, I see a real steep drop in cancer deaths by the end of the decade, because we're also going to be doing precision detection like this Robert F. Smith test or the polygenic risk test effort. Basically, pediatricians will be able to help families understand their lifetime cancer risk. And getting back to nutrition, we'll have a very good understanding of food as medicine, not trendy thinking as medicine, but we'll have the core metabolic understanding of what makes a healthier lifestyle and then we'll have apps and I think reinforcing products that allow us to really live healthier lives.
Jonathan Simons: (30:11)
I actually think that this is not only going to be the greatest decade in the history of medical research, just the breathtaking speed of the COVID vaccines or the fact that we had seven FDA approvals. Hidden in plain sight with COVID, we had seven FDA approvals for prostate cancer, which is a record year. All really driven by, again, early stage funding by our foundation, and then leveraged by the government and biopharma. I think it's going to be a decade where patients will be partners in their care, whether they're millennials, John, or not. I think health apps and the general understanding that with good health information, you can be a partner in your care is going to actually improve the care of everyone. So I'm actually very optimistic about the decade. If we can just, again, if we can just stay very focused on supporting cancer research and more broadly, biomedical research is one of the most important humanitarian things we could be doing in this country for the world.
Anthony Scaramucci: (31:22)
Before we let you go, you mentioned the vaccines. So have you been vaccinated, Doctor?
Jonathan Simons: (31:26)
I have.
Anthony Scaramucci: (31:27)
And are the vaccine safe?
Jonathan Simons: (31:29)
Yes, that's what the data says.
Anthony Scaramucci: (31:32)
Okay. But what would you be concerned about, because we have ... Just play this out for me, because we have people that are concerned about the vaccines. The data says they're safe. Do we need more data or was the data acceptable for you to get yourself vaccinated? So tell us what you think.
Jonathan Simons: (31:48)
We need more data in areas where ... We constantly need more data. In fact, what we need is a learning health system. That would have been the punchy answer to your big data question. So we need a lot more data, but by everything we know, it's much better to be vaccinated than not. And we're not over Coronavirus infections, as the variants show. So we need to become confident again that our health systems and our biomedical research efforts keep good ethical values, but are trying to basically save lives.
Anthony Scaramucci: (32:34)
Well, no, I appreciate it. It's just, unfortunately, we are in the age of tremendous amounts of information. But we're also in the age, unfortunately, of tremendous amounts of disinformation. And so you and I, John, Michael Milken, we're believers in science matters and facts first. And so would you recommend this vaccine to your patients and family members?
Jonathan Simons: (32:59)
I am.
Anthony Scaramucci: (33:00)
Okay.
Jonathan Simons: (33:01)
Actually, Anthony, you're very articulate, you're a student of history, and you know that at any moment in history, there's more that's unknown than known. So we have to be comfortable with continuing to learn. Learn about this disease. But we also have to be comfortable with evidence, and the evidence from randomized clinical trials, which is our best way of doing this, not the fastest way to do this is, the best evidence is to be vaccinated, to prevent yourself from dying of COVID-19 and spreading it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (33:48)
Amen. All right. Well, I want to leave it on that, I think. I think it's an optimistic note. We don't know everything, but we are advancing and we're doing the best that we can. It's in the best interest of our citizens in our society to get vaccinated. It'll protect them against the pandemic and future potential variants, et cetera. Anything else you want to add, Darsie?
John Darsie: (34:13)
That's it. Just want to thank Dr. Simons.
Anthony Scaramucci: (34:15)
You want to call him Peter or something like that before we leave? [crosstalk 00:34:17]. There's a P in prostate. So do you want to call him Peter before he leaves? I'm just asking.
John Darsie: (34:23)
I think I got this one nailed down.
Anthony Scaramucci: (34:25)
All right. I'm just checking.
John Darsie: (34:26)
[crosstalk 00:34:26] with Paula Schneider of the Susan G Komen foundation. But I just want to thank you Dr. Simons for all the work you've done. My father's one of millions of people. He's both a prostate cancer survivor and a skin cancer survivor. So all the research that you've done both directly related to prostate cancer, as well as the other cancers that you and Anthony were speaking about earlier, it's allowed him, this is more than a decade ago now, to live a long, healthy life, and he's now been vaccinated. So we hopefully don't have to worry too much about Coronavirus with him or my mother as well. So thank you for all the work you're doing.
Jonathan Simons: (35:02)
Well, thanks for the time today and good luck with delivering the truth to people.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:09)
We're working on it every day, sir. It's a work in progress every day.
John Darsie: (35:13)
It has been since the dawn of man.
Anthony Scaramucci: (35:15)
Amen. Amen. It's getting a little bit tricky now, man. We got a lot of disinformation out there that we're trying to fight back. [crosstalk 00:35:26]
John Darsie: (35:26)
But thank you again, Dr. Simons. And thank you everybody who tuned in to today's SALT Talk. Just by tuning in and learning and spreading awareness of the progress that's being made, as well as the facts on the ground, you're doing a service, not just to yourself and your family, but to society as well. So if you have the means to donate to the Prostate Cancer Foundation, please do. We always put our money where our mouth is and contribute to these causes that we feature here on SALT Talks. And if you're able to do so, please do.
John Darsie: (35:54)
If you can't, protect yourself and protect your family. Go get checked, go to the doctor. If you have a history of cancer in your family, you especially need to get checked frequently. But encouraged family members and friends to get checked as well and encourage them to follow the facts and get vaccinated and get checked for a variety of different diseases.
John Darsie: (36:11)
But thank you for joining us. Just a reminder, if you missed any part of this talk, or any of our previous SALT Talks, or want to sign up for our upcoming talks, you can do all of that on our website at salt.org/talks. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel where we host all of our videos for free to try to broaden access as much as possible to these ideas that we feature here on SALT Talks on a variety of issues. And please follow us on social media. We're, as well as being on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, on LinkedIn. And on behalf of the entire SALT team and Anthony, this is John Darsie signing off from SALT Talks for today. We'll see you back here again soon.