The fourth annual Wendy Walk will be held on Sunday, May 5 at 10 a.m. at 850 Palisades Beach Club Rd. (outside the Jonathan Beach Club), with prior walks held during April in Miami and New York City.
The Wendy Walk was founded in 2010 by Wendy Landes’ children Ali, now 26, Matt, 26, and Jackie, 21, to raise awareness and proactively support their mom, a Pacific Palisades resident, in her battle with liposarcoma, a rare and incurable cancer of the soft tissue. Before her death last month, she asked her children to continue the walk.
“This year is special because we are walking for a cure, but we are honoring my mom’s memory at the same time,” Ali said.
During the 2012 Walk season, 1,600 participants raised more than $750,000 in the fight against liposarcoma through the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative.
About 14,000 new cases of soft-tissue sarcoma are diagnosed each year, representing less than one percent of all newly diagnosed cancers. Considered an “orphan” cancer, the disease is sparsely funded because it affects only about 200 people in the United States annually. The Wendy Walk is the only organization funding research for liposarcoma.
The Los Angeles Wendy Walk will honor Dr. Allan Silberman of Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Silberman, who lives in the Palisades, operated on Landes four times to remove tumors.
“We are determined that with the help and support of our community we will find a cure,” the Landes children said, noting that progress has been made in finding the root cause of liposarcoma because of the funding.
Visit: wendywalk.com
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