New advanced medicines are curing patients of serious diseases.
Such medicines will one day be able to cure millions of people suffering from infectious diseases like HIV, cancer, genetic diseases, and other serious disorders.
Together we can accelerate the development of these advanced medicines and create access to cures for all patients in need.
Our Vision
Empowering
each other to create a just world without disease.
Our Mission
We are determined to accelerate the development of advanced medicines and ensure access for ALL patients by organizing and supporting a community of caregivers, innovators, volunteers, and partners.
We do this by working with organizations and companies that are committed to supporting access of curative therapies to all in need, without exception.
Our guiding values:
Patient-centric
We will uncompromisingly work towards ensuring that all patients have access to curative and affordable advanced medicines.
Impact
We help enable hospitals and health systems to manufacture advanced medicines locally and deliver them in a cost-effective manner.
Commitment
We will persistently work to expand access to advanced medicines to marginalized and impoverished communities throughout the world.
Determination
We have a relentless drive to invent and engineer innovative products, services, and therapies collaboratively, and share success fairly.
Responsibility
We build relationships based on honesty, trust, and adhering to the highest ethical standards in all our activities and initiatives.
Our Visual Identity
Found in the Australian Outback, bush medicine plants are used to treat a variety of ailments and conditions with their restorative powers. The leaves have been used for thousands of years by people living in a place called Utopia in Central Australia.
During the life of a bush plant, its leaves change color and exhibit different medicinal properties. Based on the time of year, ground up leaves are used to treat coughs, colds, flu symptoms, cuts, wounds, bites, rashes, aching joints, headaches—and even used as an insect repellent.
Like all aspects of traditional Aboriginal culture, knowledge of bush medicine has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years and is still being used today in Utopia.
Bush medicine leaf paintings are a well-documented dreamtime story painted by women artists local to this area.
Our logo mark is inspired by these remarkable medicinal bush leaves.
Each magenta-colored heart is made from two crossed leaves overlapping, with single cyan leaves between each.
The color, number, and organization of the leaves symbolizes the complexity and multiple uses of advanced medicines as disease cures.
“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
LILLA WATSON
Aboriginal elder, activist and educator
Founders’ Story
Caring Cross co-founder, Boro Dropulić, was born and raised in Australia, the son of Croatian immigrant parents that fled ideologically torn Europe after the Second World War. A virologist by training, he has worked in the gene therapy field since the late 1980s.
After completing his post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, he joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University (JHU) where he worked on engineering a gutted version of HIV, a Lentiviral vector, into a potential treatment of HIV/AIDS.
At that time fellow JHU faculty member Rimas Orentas (Caring Cross co-founder), with a similar family history of Lithuanian origin, was working to develop T-cell immunotherapies that effectively kill cancer cells in the body.
The nature of their work at that time meant long hours in the BL3 laboratory from which time the two became good colleagues. Boro later led the team that first established the safety of Lentiviral vectors in humans. Rimas would go on to develop multiple clinically successful CAR-T cell therapies.
During their combined 60-year experience in academia and industry, Boro and Rimas have witnessed the development of the gene and cell therapy field to where now several curative therapies have been approved by the FDA and other regulatory agencies. We are at the beginning of a whole new era of developing cures for many diseases and helping millions of lives.
Clearly, the current models for providing cures with a price tag of greater than $350,000 for a single dose are not sustainable in developed nations, let alone the developing world. A sustainable model would require a fresh approach to support cure development and affordable access.
The idea of Caring Cross arose from discussions among Boro, Rimas and many experienced scientist and business leaders to find ways to overcome these challenges and bring advanced medicines affordably to all patients in need, everywhere around the world, without exception.
