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They expected to sell, maybe, 10,000 books and raise $150,000 for cancer research.
Instead, they've sold more than $500,000 worth of books and they're making a difference in the world of Indiana cancer research.
The Catherine Peachey Fund Inc., financed primarily through sales of "Just Peachey, Cooking Up A Cure," has funded research grants, helped pay for an angiogenesis lab at the Indiana University Cancer Center, and has provided a three-year salary for a researcher from Japan.
The cookbook, which was developed in Warsaw using local volunteers and talent, has been featured on national television, has been welcomed at the White House by Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore, and has been a top seller on QVC, the national cable shopping network.
Its success has meant that some breast cancer research projects that may have died before for lack of funding are being done.
"A lot of research is going on now that wouldn't be possible without the Peachey Fund," said Dr. Stephen D. Williams, director of the IU Cancer Center.
The purpose of Catherine Peachey Fund grants is not to fund entire research projects, Williams said, but to allow the physicians and scientists the financing necessary to get the preliminary data they need to get major financing.
For example, a Catherine Peachey Fund grant to Dr. Pamela Crowell allowed her to produce the preliminary data that led to her project getting a $450,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Williams said Crowell is studying how cancer cells divide and how that division can be controlled.
"The big picture for these grants is that they help our scientists pursue innovative projects in the field of breast cancer," he said. "They finance high-risk, high-reward projects."
Other research projects involve identifying genetic differences in cancer cells before and after they metastasize (spread to other parts of the body); and studying angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels that nourish a cancerous tumor. Drugs or other methods of interfering with this process may be valuable not only to breast cancer treatment but to other types of cancer as well.
The Catherine Peachey Fund, named after and set up by a prominent Indianapolis woman who died in 1994 of breast cancer, also is paying the salary of Dr. Shinichi Nozaki, a doctoral fellow from Japan. Nozaki has experience in molecular biology research techniques, Williams said, and "he brings an area of expertise to the lab that wasn't there before."
"He would not have been here without the Peachey Fund, which paid for his salary," Williams said.
All grant proposals are reviewed by a group of expert consultants, and a written critique is prepared. "The Peachey board has a lot of say in what gets funded," Williams said. "There's a high level of accountability in how the funds are spent, and the funds directly benefit the people in Indiana."
The cookbook that made all this possible, "Just Peachey: Cooking Up A Cure," began in the fall of 1994 as a project of the Women Winning Against Breast Cancer, a local support group. All of the work on the cookbook was done by volunteers, with time, materials and labor donated by various businesses and other services in the area.
The cookbook sells for $15 throughout Indiana and the United States, mostly by women who volunteer to be distributors. Connie Rufenbarger, cookbook editor, said the results have been gratifying for everyone involved. "It's overwhelming," she said. "Very few projects raise this kind of money."
The IU Cancer Center physicians and staff have expressed their amazement and gratitude to Rufenbarger, she said. "When a large university raises money, it's not as personal. When your patients go out and sell books out of the trunks of their cars, it's overwhelming."
Rufenbarger attributed the cookbook's success to the quality of the volunteers in Warsaw who developed it. "We really are a community in the true sense of the word," she said. "It's a very unique community - we have the means but we also have the heart."
She said as rewarding as the results of selling the cookbook have become, "the need still outstrips the feeling of accomplishment."
The Peachey Fund will hold a concert and auction in October, National Breast Cancer Month, to continue to raise money for research. The auction will feature donated items from celebrities who submitted recipes to the cookbook.
Rufenbarger acknowledges that a lot has been accomplished through the Peachey Fund's efforts so far, but believes there is still a lot left to do:
"If we can make a difference, how can we not?"
