Team Beans: Benefiting the Infant Brain Tumor Program at Dana-Farber

The Team Beans Infant Brain Tumor Fund at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was established in 2021 in memory of Francesca “Beans” Kaczynski. Beans passed away at nine months old on Christmas Eve 2020 of a rare brain tumor known as ATRT.

Beans was an outgoing, bold and curious baby. She had huge, deep brown eyes that followed whatever her parents were doing. She loved eating and being held close, particularly in the evenings. A Brooklyn-based Sesame Street fan, she enjoyed taking long walks around New York City and Boston, playing with her toys and balloons, attending speech therapy, and “petting” (i.e. grabbing) her cat Ryland.

With more than 20,000 grassroots donors, in less than two short years since Bean's death, the Team Beans Infant Brain Tumor Fund has already raised more than $2,500,000 for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and has set numerous fundraising event records. This money was crucial to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute establishing a brand new Infant Brain Tumor Program. And Team Beans is the biggest financial supporter of this program looking for cures for childhood brain cancer – the number one cause of death by disease in children.

Team Beans has primarily raised money through the Boston Marathon, Pan-Mass Challenge and the sale of Team Beans merchandise. In 2021, Team Beans set the record for money raised for a team in the Pan Mass Challenger Winter Cycle, and in 2022, Team Beans became the number one internal Jimmy Fund fundraising team ever after our record-smashing total of $614,000 raised through the 2022 Boston Marathon.

This year, I will be riding 40+ miles through New York City -- the city where Beans' lived her normal life before cancer -- to help raise money for the Infant Brain Tumor Program. Every donation goes directly to support amazing research and clinical trials.

Though Francesca will never get to experience the life she should have, with everyone’s support we can create a lasting legacy for her.

As anyone who followed Francesca’s story knows, treatment options for young children with brain tumors are still very limited. The only treatments for these aggressive cancers are often harsh chemotherapy regimens that require families to spend months living in the hospital. They often fail to work and sometimes, as we unfortunately learned firsthand, have fatal side effects.

And yet the heroic medical professionals who work hard every day to improve outcomes of our babies too often face severe funding challenges. That’s why your contributions in Francesca’s memory are a huge game changer.

Francesca’s neuro-oncologist and head of the new program, renowned expert Dr. Susan Chi, says the new center will enable Dana-Farber to fund new projects and accelerate research in this crucial area. There’s so much work left to do to understand how brain cancer works in infants and explore less brutal treatments. And progress in this fight will only be made bit by bit through the kinds of clinical trials and research projects that the center will house.

We miss Francesca tremendously every day. We will always be her parents and our efforts to fight childhood cancer are a way of staying true to our responsibility to take care of her.

-Andrew