Just two years ago, anyone with cancer in Tuba City, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation, faced at least a three-hour roundtrip for treatment. That did not sit well with Lynette Bonar, CEO of Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation (TCRHCC). In 2019, she and her colleagues opened a cancer-care center, the first on the Navajo Nation.

"In two years," Bonar says, "we've seen more than 400 patients. We now get more than 2,000 visits a year."

The work earned Bonar the Catalyst for Change Award at the 2020 Cancer Community Awards, a program co-developed by Scientific American Custom Media and AstraZeneca.

"We received national recognition of the cancer-care disparities here on the Navajo Nation," Bonar says. Since then, more than just patients have come calling. “There are programs and communities that still don't have accessible cancer care, especially when they live in an area that has high poverty. Other programs want to learn how we got to where we are, how we are decreasing cancer-care disparities.”

Bonar believes it is important to get more Native Americans involved in the research and development of tomorrow's cancer treatments. “Many clinical trials don't pay attention to minorities,” she says. "We want to get more of these people into clinical trials as indicated, so that our biology is included."

In 2020, Bonar and her colleagues received a grant from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration's Radiation Exposure Screening & Education Program. The Navajo Nation was a hub for uranium prospecting in the 1950s, and most communities had no education on the importance of cancer screening because of the presence of abandoned uranium mines. "Native American people usually get diagnosed with cancer in late stages," Bonar says. "We hope to change that, so you're diagnosed in stage one."

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