GadTTRAC. Nonprofit created to benefit sufferers of Gadolinium and other metal toxicities.

I founded GadTTRAC, acronym for Gadolinium and other heavy metal Treatment, Teaching, Research, and Advocacy Center a few years back with the intention of creating an organization with a focus primarily on treating sufferers of Gadolinium Deposition (GDD), and other heavy metal Diseases. To be frank, I have never promoted GadTTRAC, or sent out requests for funding or to establish membership. Primarily this is because I had felt that there was not sufficient articles in the peer-reviewed literature to represent GDD as a valid disease back then.

This day has come, and maybe it came some months back. We are now in a position to seek funding support for our missions and to establish a membership. The administration and board our currently well vitalized, Rev Tina Brown is the Executive Director, Gail Montani is the Secretary, and holds other responsibilities such as outreach. We have a board including a few well established health care providers for Gadolinium and other chronic diseases.

I invite you to go to gadttrac.org to check out the organization.

Treatment that I consider state of the art is presently conducted at a number of institutions across the USA and the world. These are listed on the gadttrac.org site. Guidance for treatment has been primarily performed by myself, but now second generation instructors are also at work. If you are a treating center and we have missed listing you on gadttrac.org as a recommended treating center, please let myself or Tina Brown know.... I am not the best at keeping track of contacts.

Several individuals who have been financially devastated by GDD have had their treatment funded by GadTTRAC, at least for 3 chelation sessions.

Teaching. Peer-reviewed articles, blogs, and various presentations in other settings have served as teaching. Presentations have been conducted by a number of members on the board at various types of meeting settings.

Research. I and others in the group have been intently involved in generating top level research publications, some in collaboration with top institutions, notably Stanford University. Peer-reviewed articles are the gold standard for authoritative writing on medical subjects. I with members of the board have in excess of 16 major peer-reviewed articles, many in major medical journals. Some of the work we have performed on cytokines in collaboration with physicians and scientists at Stanford are unique research in human cytokine response, never performed before for any disease.

Advocacy. A few members of the board, notably Rev Tina Brown and Gail Montani have been very active in promoting recognition of GDD both in the political arena and in various large organizations.

To the present time, virtually the entire work for GadTTRAC has been financed by members of the board, with appreciated help from large patient advocacy groups, with special recognition to Debbie Lambert. The work of GadTTRAC to date includes education, research and payment of destitute sufferers' treatment. Personally, I have been reticent to send out request for donations, because I have looked across the globe and seen so many individuals in horrific situations, that I have felt perhaps for human charities they may need money the most. If this kind of thinking was pervasive then there would be only a few charities: for Ukraine, Africa etc, so one could argue this has been naive thinking on my part.

To date, unlike most/all charities almost all money that GadTTRAC has received has gone into the charity mission, especially for charity care for those without any finances. So donations are largely for people to help them right now, and to benefit care that is right now, and not for the hope of distant advances. Entire self-funding is obviously unsustainable for almost all organizations, except for those operated by billionaires. None of us at GadTTRAC are in that category.

So in the current phase of outreach of GadTTRAC, I request that those who have benefitted from or appreciate the work that all of us at GadTTRAC have done collectively, consider the following: if you can afford to donate money, please do so. You can also stipulate how the money is spent, including if it is to be dedicated to the care of a particular person. The research that I have done has been entirely self-funded (ie: I paid for it) and with some assistance from a Stanford colleague. As a result, although important work on cytokines have been published, the small scale of the work, means that the findings are interesting, but not definitive. Our most hot button current short term research interest is in finding the gene(s) responsible for GDD. We intend in the intermediate term to return to cytokine research with a focus on Treg cells and Teff cells to get into the next phase of treatment, targeted modulating the response of the individual to the presence of Gd (and other heavy metals). At present our focus has been on Gd removal, which will continue, but also look into next generation chelation beyond DTPA, with other chelating agents.

Research on a meaningful scale is expensive, and the gene detection project we anticipate will cost at least $500,000.

Membership. We are in the process of creating a membership program. Where individuals can join GadTTRAC as a member. We hope a number will also be willing to volunteer their time, for activities such as counselling individuals with disease who are distraught by their condition, and volunteering for events we intend to host in the future.

GadTTRAC is also not limited to Gd. The same treatment approach we use for Gd is also the optimal strategy for lead (Pb), and we are expanding our interest and research into other metals.

You can visit gadttrac.org and contact Rev Tina Brown for more details on the plans and needs of GadTTRAC.

thank you,

Richard Semelka, MD