Bob Saget With Top Chef Masters and Other Headlining Comedians to Help Find a Cure For Scleroderma

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 29, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Actor/Comedian/Director Bob Saget will host Cool Comedy – Hot Cuisine, the signature event of the Scleroderma Research Foundation (SRF) on Monday, November 4 at Carolines on Broadway. Saget, an SRF Board Member who lost his sister to scleroderma, will be joined in the fundraising effort by comedians Jim Gaffigan, John Oliver (The Daily Show) and other special guests. Saget's friend and co-star from the Full House days, John Stamos (Necessary Roughness), will co-host a live auction featuring six high-end packages.

Presented by Actelion Pharmaceuticals, Cool Comedy – Hot Cuisine benefits the SRF, America's leading nonprofit investor in research to find improved therapies and a cure for people living with scleroderma. The word "scleroderma" literally means "hard skin," but the disease is often much more, affecting the internal organs with life-threatening consequences.

The symptoms and severity of scleroderma, an autoimmune disease with no known cause or cure, vary greatly and the course of the disease is often unpredictable. Women between the ages of 20 and 50 represent 80% of patients; however, children and men of all ages are also affected.

The "Hot Cuisine" will be provided by Bravo Top Chef Masters and restaurateurs Susan Feniger (also an SRF Board Member) and Mary Sue Milliken (Food Network's Too Hot Tamales) featuring Latin American dishes from their popular Border Grill restaurants in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

"We're making some incredible strides on the research front," says Saget. "Just this month, in an October issue of Nature, an SRF-funded investigator published a paper that turns much of what scientists previously knew about scleroderma on its head. Dr. Hal Dietz at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine showed in a laboratory setting that skin fibrosis (thickening or hardening) could not only be stopped but actually reversed."

Cool Comedy – Hot Cuisine events held in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco have raised considerable awareness for scleroderma and enabled the SRF to fund research aimed at helping patients live longer, fuller lives. Founded by Saget's friend and scleroderma patient Sharon Monsky in 1987, the SRF has raised more than $33,000,000 to fund medical research at prominent academic institutions such as, Dartmouth, Stanford, University of California San Francisco and other universities as well as America's foremost scleroderma center at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Luke Evnin, SRF Board Chair and Managing Partner of MPM Capital, a private equity firm that has invested more than $2.8 billion in life sciences, explains the Foundation's focus on partnership—often rare in the highly competitive medical research field. He says, "Our collaborative approach is enabling scientists from leading institutions across the nation and abroad to work together and develop an understanding of how scleroderma begins, progresses and what can be done to slow, halt and even reverse the disease process."

Cool Comedy – Hot Cuisine includes a live auction. Up for bid are packages including the opportunity to be part of Fox Television's American Idol 2014 finale and in-home dinners prepared by Top Chef Masters Elizabeth Falkner and Susan Feniger. A rare dinner for eight at New York's legendary Rao's, where the wait list can be longer than five years, will also be offered. Travel packages are accompanied by first-class airfare provided by event partner Delta Air Lines.

All contributions benefit the Scleroderma Research Foundation. For more information, call (800) 441-CURE or visit www.sclerodermaRESEARCH.org.

SOURCE Scleroderma Research Foundation