Swifty began in 2014 after the death of Michael Gustafson. Before his death he created his “Master Plan”….his decision to donate his tumor tissue to research. Michael’s Master Plan ultimately led Swifty to develop the Gift from a Child program: a national post-mortem (PM) brain tumor donation program benefitting research.

Since 2017 it’s been Swifty and Gift from a Child…Together Toward Hope. Michael’s Master Plan became Swifty’s Master Plan because there was no national, coordinated donation program. Since 2018 Swifty has invested almost 6.8 million dollars in Gift from a Child (GFAC) and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network, GFAC’s coordinating center. With CBTN, we’ve created the infrastructure to access, process and share post-mortem tissue. The research that happens after the tissue is donated is just as important as the tissue itself. So in 2024, Gift from a Child became a program of the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN).
 
CBTN’s focus is to maximize donated tissue’s potential to accelerate breakthroughs in treatments. CBTN provides free and open access to PM tissue and its data to the worldwide research community.
  To learn more about CBTN

A bit of history as to how did we do it…
In 2017 we gathered families who’d lost a child to brain cancer, and the best researchers/clinicians around the country who were helping families donate PM tissue locally. We nurtured relationships, hammered out logistics, developed workflows, overcame obstacles and eventually Gift from a Child was born. GFAC is a network of seven  Centers of Excellence around the country. These seven centers act as regional autopsy sites for the coordination, processing and storage of autopsied materials as well as generating preclinical models of the disease. Those donations are stored and accessible at the Children’s Brain Tumor Network.