Stand Up to Cancer’s Fund-Raising Telethon Brings in $80-Million

Stand Up to Cancer raised more than $80-million in pledges for cancer research and efforts to speed up new therapies to patients during its television special last week.

That’s 20 percent less than the $100-million raised during its inaugural telethon in 2008, when the actor Patrick Swayze first made remarks about his battle with pancreatic cancer. He died a year later.

Major League Baseball donated the most—$20-million—to the cause this year; it pledged $10-million in 2008. Other major contributors include the philanthropist and businessman Sidney Kimmel, as well as Amgen, the Annenberg Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and GlaxoSmithKline.

More viewers saw the telecast this year, though, than the first—an audience of 18.3 million, up 15 percent, according to Nielsen.

The one-hour, commercial-free fund-raising event was hosted by the network news anchors Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and Brian Williams, and was broadcast live by all the major networks and a dozen outlets, including Discovery Health, HBO, and VH1, as well as streamed online.

More than 80 celebrities, including Michael Douglas, Jay Leno, and Gwyneth Paltrow, worked the live phone bank or participated. About a week and a half before the telethon, Mr. Douglas, 65, announced on CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman that he had the most-advanced form of throat cancer.

The telethon can be watched online at http://www.su2c.org/2010show.