Crowds of students and community members gathered Friday night at Lied Recreation Athletic Center for the 2017 Relay For Life to support their friends, family and other members of their community fighting cancer.

The event took place from 7 p.m. Friday to 1 a.m Saturday.

Hosted and organized by Colleges Against Cancer, Relay for Life raises funds for cancer research and provides a means for the local community to stand in solidarity with those fighting cancer.

Alissa Calsyn, survivorship chair of Colleges Against Cancer at Iowa State, said the desire is for the event is to have 800 participants, 80 teams and to raise $80,000 for cancer research.

“The American Cancer Society is the benefactor in all of this. One of the big things it goes to is research and that goes to help write legislation,” Calsyn said. “I believe the American Cancer Society is then responsible for most of the recent breakthroughs in cancer research.”

Calsyn said that the American Cancer Society also has other programs for cancer survivors, including Road To Recovery, where volunteer drivers can transport local cancer patients to hospitals and care centers for treatment.

Calsyn explained how the Olympic games were inspiration for the theme of this year’s event.

“Tonight we’ve got anything from long jump, three-legged race, to egg toss and stuff like that,” she said.

Everyone volunteering or participating in Relay For Life has their own experience that brought the event to their attention and led them to get involved.

Calsyn explained how her mother was diagnosed with terminal stage four colorectal cancer in 2014.

She discovered Relay For Life at Iowa State University and was eager to participate, becoming an executive member dealing with all things involving cancer survivors in Colleges Against Cancer.

Volunteer Thomas Powell has had a long personal history with Relay for Life.

“I did several Relays For Life at my high school,” he said. “One of my friends who was vice president of our club joined Colleges Against Cancer here so he invited me to join as well.”

For some participants without connection to anyone with cancer, like Dan Gagni, this is an issue seen as important and worth a long night at Lied.

“They had this at my high school and I didn’t participate. I figured now that I’m in college I should take advantage of the opportunity,” Gagni said.

Other participants like Jeremy Jacobsen have much more direct experience.

“This is my first year. I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2015 so since becoming cancer free at the end of 2015, it’s become a more important issue for me,” he said.

Jacobsen expressed how important this event is to him and many others. For many who suffer from cancer, it still seems that we do so little and that more work needs to be done.

“For my type of cancer that I had, there’s very little studies on that one, but even for cancers as a whole, there’s just not enough,” Jacobsen said. “We don’t know enough. We just aren’t doing enough studies, so we need to raise more money.”