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Maybe you contributed a recipe, bought a cookbook or attended the benefit concert and auction last fall.
And maybe you did it because it seemed like the right thing to do, because everybody else was doing it or because you had personal reasons for wanting to help.
No matter how much you did or why you did it, your involvement with the "Just Peachey: Cooking Up A Cure" cookbook may actually have had a hand in what is now being hailed as a promising cancer treatment.
"The very first grant the Peachey Fund ever gave out was a grant to my lab," Dr. George Sledge Jr., professor of medicine, pathology and laboratory at the IU Cancer Center in Indianapolis, said last week.
That grant enabled Sledge to buy equipment for his angiogenesis lab, where he has been experimenting on ways to cut off the blood flow to cancerous tumors.
Unlike other research that has generated a lot of publicity lately, Sledge's work has been done quietly, but just as effectively.
Concerned with metastasis - the spread of cancer from a tumor in one part of the body to another organ or location - Sledge has concentrated on the fact that cancerous tumors develop their own blood vessels.
"It's obvious that new blood vessel formation is crucial to the growth and spread of solid tumor cancers," he said. "There is now solid laboratory evidence that compounds that prevent blood vessel growth can block the spread of cancer."
And once the tumor can't make blood vessels to feed itself, the tumor dies, he said.
Sledge has been researching a "monoclonal antibody" that goes by the name VEGF - a hormone cancers make that stimulates new blood vessel growth, he said.
While there's "a great deal of excitement in the oncology field here" regarding drugs that prevent blood vessel formation, Sledge said, these drugs have not yet been tested on people.
Also, it is not yet known if the drugs will provide a permanent cure, he said, or if the tumor will revive after the drugs are no longer taken.
Still, he said, "This may require us to totally rethink how we treat cancer.
"It could be like diabetes - it could turn cancer into a chronic disease like diabetes" instead of the cure-or-die dilemma it now presents.
He also said the idea of stopping a tumor from growing is a new concept in cancer treatment: "In the past we were used to seeing them shrink."
Sledge said previous successful experiments were on mice only, and human trials on batimastat - the drug he has concentrated on that attacks only the enzyme released by the cancer - could start as early as next fall.
"The trials are approved by the FDA and they're tightly controlled," he said. "We basically start off by treating advanced patients with no other treatment available."
Sledge has such a noted national reputation as an oncologist and researcher that the Peachey Fund was created in large part to keep him in Indiana, said Connie Rufenbarger, "Just Peachey" editor and national breast cancer advocate.
Rufenbarger said area residents who bought or contributed to "Just Peachey" should be justifiably proud of their role in such landmark research. She said so far the Peachey Fund has granted approximately $185,000 to Sledge's project, and $375,000 total to all grant recipients.
"Warsaw women created the book and the majority of underwriting came from Warsaw," she said.
"We do one book and end up funding someone who may be part of a cure for breast cancer and then for all cancers.
"You can't do this alone - there is the hand of God in this."
Sledge said there are eight to 10 different classes of drugs that affect new blood vessel formation, and different drugs are being looked at by different labs.
He said the Peachey Fund was instrumental in providing equipment that will help his lab in the upcoming trials.
"The Peachey Fund has been incredibly important in developing the lab technology to monitor the response to therapy," he said.
