“This is why we all went into medicine—for moments like this where we come together.”

For Jonathan Simons and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, global collaboration and team science were a way of life long before the pandemic. The organization’s support of groundbreaking science has changed our understanding of cancer—from organ-specific to mutation-specific—and has thus translated into effective solutions for patients across more than 70 forms of the disease. 

The hard-won lessons from the war on cancer, Simons believes, will be crucial to solving COVID-19. And he predicts that what we learn from the current surge of collaborative research will save lives from other diseases long into the future.