LEXINGTON, Va. - The VMI men's and women's swimming and diving teams participated in the 15th annual Ted Mullin "Leave it in the Pool" Hour of Power Relay for Sarcoma Research Tuesday in Clark King pool.
The event is sponsored by the Carleton College swimming and diving teams and honors those who are fighting or have succumbed to cancer, including former Carleton swimmer Edward H. "Ted" Mullin, who passed away from synovial sarcoma, a rare soft-tissue cancer, in September 2006.

"I'm excited to continue our team's participation in this year's Hour of Power," said VMI head coach Andrew Bretscher. "It's always a fun event for the athletes, but the larger picture is helping to build awareness for sarcoma research and the Ted Mullin Fund. Promoting and participating in this events is always and honor, and I believe it's a great opportunity for our team to swim with a higher purpose in mind."

The annual swim relay, which now includes dryland teams as well, has grown from 15 teams in its first year to over 170 teams and more than 7,100 athletes across the nation and the world in recent years. Participating swim teams engage in continuous relays of any stroke for a full hour of all-out swimming. Dryland teams engage in their particular sport non-stop for a full hour.

In the event's first 14 years, participating teams have raised over $885,000 for the Ted Mullin Fund to support research at the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children's Hospital into the causes and treatment of sarcoma and other rare pediatric cancers.
 
Money raised acts as seed funding for the University of Chicago Medicine's (UCM) pediatric cancer research program. The Ted Mullin Fund has supported research into novel chemotherapy/biology agents, new ways to administer chemotherapy, techniques to visualize more accurately the tumor response in the patient, novel genomics strategies to identify high-risk sarcoma patients, molecular techniques to personalize therapy to maximize benefit while reducing treatment-related toxicity, and treatments for metastatic or resistant disease that use the patient's own immune system to attack residual tumors. Each summer, the UCM hosts Ted Mullin Fund Scholars in pediatric cancer laboratories, giving collegiate Ted Mullin "Hour of
Power" participants the opportunity to advance their interest in science and cancer biology. With initial seed money from the Ted Mullin Fund, UCM is celebrating the seventh anniversary of the Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology Program. The Fund also supports the UCM comprehensive Pediatric Cancer Data Commons that will collect standardized data from as many pediatric cancer patients as possible in one central repository and share it openly with the entire research community.
 
For more information, go to http://go.carleton.edu/HourOfPower.