Michael Milken to Receive Cancer Nation’s Inaugural March Forward Award

Philanthropist and cancer survivor Michael Milken will receive the inaugural March Forward Award at Cancer Nation’s 40th Anniversary Gala on November 13, 2026, in Washington, DC. The award recognizes Milken’s legacy of philanthropy and advocacy that have fundamentally changed how this country researches, treats, and cares for people with cancer.

Why Michael Milken

Milken’s connection to the cancer survivorship movement reaches back decades. He partnered early with the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, now Cancer Nation, to co-chair THE MARCH: Coming Together To Conquer Cancer in 1998, when hundreds of thousands of survivors, advocates, and policymakers filled the National Mall and other venues across the country to demand better care and the research to make it possible.

The March launched a successful effort that doubled the budget of the National Institutes of Health, elevated cancer as a national priority, and brought to the national stage a survivorship movement that is still going strong nearly three decades later.

Milken did not stop there. Through the Milken Institute and the FasterCures initiative, he has spent decades tearing down the barriers between discovery and the survivors waiting on it. He founded the Prostate Cancer Foundation, now the world’s largest philanthropic source of prostate cancer research funding, and helped launch the Melanoma Research Alliance. He pushed for the 21st Century Cures Act until it became law. His 2023 book, Faster Cures: Accelerating the Future of Health, makes the case he has been making for 50 years: waiting is not a strategy.

Survivors know the cost of waiting better than anyone. Milken has spent a lifetime refusing to accept it.

What is the March Forward Award?

The March Forward Award recognizes individuals whose leadership, investment, or advocacy has fundamentally changed how our nation researches, treats, or cares for people with cancer. Its name comes straight out of our own history: the 1998 March on Washington, and a belief that has guided us for 40 years.

Progress in cancer care requires us to continue marching forward, demanding the federal investment in research and improvements in care delivery. This award honors the people who refuse to wait. They create the momentum, build the institutions, advance the ideas, and move the rest of us with them.

Forty years, one demand

Forty years ago, survivors and caregivers who refused to accept a health care system that treated them as an afterthought came together to form Cancer Nation. Today, our demand has not changed: quality cancer care for every person cancer touches.

Honoring Milken at our 40th Anniversary Gala closes a circle that opened on the National Mall in 1998. It also opens the next one. Whole-person cancer care, survivorship care plans, and real financial protections are still not standard. That is the work ahead, and this is the night we build the momentum to move it forward. Fittingly, we will gather at the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, blocks from the Capitol where survivors made their case 28 years ago.