Co-Founder, MET Crusaders

Laura Greco was diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer in the winter of 2015. Like many young men and women diagnosed with lung cancer, Laura had no reason to think she was at any risk of this deadly disease. The mother of two young boys, aged only 2 and 6 when she was diagnosed, Laura was determined from the first that her fight against lung cancer would be a “total war.” She’d fight the disease on any and all fronts. She promised from the beginning that she would leave no stone unturned in her efforts to have more time with her children, to advance the treatment options for lung cancer patients, and to see this disease eradicated.

Laura’s cancer was driven by an ALK+ translocation with a MET amplification that would eventually complicate her treatments. Laura experienced the full range of cancer treatments: chemotherapy, radiation therapy, interventionist surgeries, targeted therapies, and clinical trials. Laura was one of the first patients to combine multiple targeted genetic therapies to treat different oncogenic drivers at the same time. This practice is now generally a standard practice to help in the fight against acquired resistances to initial targeted mono-therapy.

An attorney by profession, Laura also used her keen legal eye to help advance the lung cancer community’s efforts to promote legislation and funding in the fight against the disease. A founding figure of several different lung cancer groups – ALK+, the MET Crusaders, and Life and Breath to name a few – Laura understood, as only a lawyer might, the power of numbers and the value of taking your fight right to the seat of power.

Laura Greco died in July 2024. She was only 49. At the time of her death, Laura was patient twelve in a clinical trial to combat leptomeningeal disease (LMD). Laura’s cancer, which had metastasized to her brain in 2016, had advanced into the fluid around her brain in October 2024. At the time she was diagnosed with LMD, Laura was told she had only four weeks to live. When Laura died eight months later, her LMD was under control. She took great comfort in knowing that she was part of a study that was successfully making a once dire diagnosis slightly less frightening.

That had been her goal since her initial diagnosis. If she could not beat this disease, she would fight as long as she could. She would improve the landscape for those who came after her, and she would, she believed, inspire a new generation of crusaders to fight the fight when she was gone.

That the fight could be won, someday, she never doubted.

Founder, MET Crusaders

John Hallick, of Black Earth, Wisconsin, was a serial business entrepreneur, community volunteer, and philanthropist. He was diagnosed with the MET Exon 14 Skipping alteration in February of 2018. While looking for ways to help others with the MET alteration and promote new treatments, several people suggested starting a MET Oncogenic Group. The rest is history. John built MET Crusaders patient by patient, care partner by care partner, and he personally handled the navigation of countless MET patients for several years until he passed away on March 4, 2023. He was and remains well known to all of the MET-focused thoracic oncologists and scientists who he spoke with regularly and who he shared with the MET Crusaders. We will never forget him.

The MET Crusaders is now under the ICAN, International Cancer Advocacy Network umbrella. ICAN leadership will do everything in our power to continue John’s impressive, irreplaceable legacy and realize his dream of turning the MET Crusaders into a multi-stakeholder global organization focused on turning MET-altered diagnoses into manageable diseases and then curing them.