Guest Profile

Rusty Robertson & Karen Taphorn

About Rusty -
Named as one of the Top 100 Marketers by Advertising Age magazine, and as one of the most entrepreneurial women in the United States, Rusty Robertson is a founding partner in RSA and the founder of RPR & Associates, which was featured in Success magazine as one of America’s Super 8 companies. Rusty is also a literary agent and award winning brand marketer, branding hundreds of major corporations and generating over $500 million for her clients and their companies. Rusty, along with her colleagues at RSA, spearheads the marketing, branding, and promotional initiatives for Stand Up To Cancer, as well as being a fundraiser and executive leader of the organization. She helped create the Margaret Thatcher Foundation and was instrumental in the launch of the Susan G. Komen Foundation with Nancy Brinker. Rusty lost her mother to lung cancer.

About Karen -
Karen Taphorn was first diagnosed with metastatic melanoma in 2011 and was treated with surgery. One year later, the cancer returned and the lymph nodes down one side of her leg had to be removed. Five months later, after scans, her cancer was found to have metastasized to her hip and there were 24 tumors in her lungs. The standard chemotherapy options were limited and not very effective and the five-year survival rate for metastatic melanoma was about 10 to 15 percent. Karen’s doctors, researchers in the Stand Up To Cancer – Cancer Research Institute Immunology Dream Team enrolled her in a clinical, a combination of the immunotherapy drugs Yervoy and Opdivo. Two years after Karen completed treatment in this SU2C clinical trial, she continues to show “no evidence of disease.”