Why We Fight

Jeffrey Thomas Hayden was a brilliant, athletic 12-year-old who loved school, excelled at sports, and possessed a legendary sense of humor. He was a boy who ran until he dropped, whose playful rivalry with his schoolteacher over Ohio State and Michigan football remains a lasting memory of his vibrant spirit. When Jeffrey was diagnosed with an inoperable malignant brain tumor known as diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), he gave the battle absolutely everything he had. He passed away just one month shy of his 13th birthday.

Refusing to sit on the sidelines, his parents, Tim and Cindy Hayden, chose to channel their grief into immediate, proactive action. In September 2004, they founded JTHF to fund the pediatric cancer research that these children desperately need. Instead of letting the story end with loss, they have spent over two decades keeping Jeff’s competitive spirit alive, establishing the foundation as a major force behind the International DIPG/DMG Registry at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. By partnering with The Cure Starts Now, they continue to scale this fight, turning their love for Jeff into a direct, unrelenting engine for global medical breakthroughs

When it comes to pediatric cancer, we don't look for the easiest battles. We look for the smartest path to a cure.

The Cure Starts Now was built on a single, aggressive strategy: the Homerun Cure. Medical experts widely agree that pediatric brain tumors like DIPG hold the genetic master key to the entire disease. If we can break the code to defeat a cancer this complex, we unlock the breakthroughs needed to beat all other forms of pediatric cancer.

The Cure Starts Now started in Cincinnati after Keith and Brooke Desserich lost their six-year-old daughter, Elena, to DIPG. They saw firsthand that doctors were working in isolation, starved for the data and funding needed to make real progress.

To change that, they built a centralized way to fight back. Now, The Cure Starts Now has more than 60 chapters and funds the International DIPG/DMG Registry, bringing over 100 hospitals worldwide together to share data. Through the DIPG Collaborative, we ensure that resources are pooled to fund peer-reviewed medical research across the globe.

We started with one family's loss, and we built the network that is going to find the cure.