Got Lungs?

By Jen A. Miller
July 7, 2026 | VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2

When Heidi Onda was diagnosed with stage 3A inoperable lung cancer in 2018, it was a shock.

Her physician ordered a CT scan because of her history with ovarian cysts, not because she had any respiratory symptoms. She didn’t seem like the “typical” person to get lung cancer either. She’s a health educator and fitness trainer who had never smoked, and her husband, Pierre Onda, MD, MPH, is a retired primary care physician.

“We were two people trained in prevention and didn’t know this could happen to anyone,” she said.

Fortunately, through radiation and chemotherapy, plus an immunotherapy drug that had been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration the year of her diagnosis, Heidi is now cancer-free. But she hasn’t forgotten her experience. 

“There’s a growing population of people just like me—and some significantly younger—who this happens to,” said Heidi, who was diagnosed at 55 years old. “Where was the awareness?”

In 2020, the Denver couple, who will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this month, founded The White Ribbon Project, a nonprofit that works on spreading awareness. Their goal is to change the conversation about who can get lung cancer—and the compassion and care such patients deserve, regardless of whether they have a smoking history.

Lung cancer in America today

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in both men and women, according to the American Cancer Society.¹ The organization projects that there will be 229,410 new cases of lung cancer in the United States this year and 124,900 deaths. Lung cancer is also the leading cause of cancer death in the United States.

Yet there is a pervasive stigma against people with lung cancer because of its association with smoking. While tobacco use is a contributing factor to developing lung cancer, 10% to 20% of lung cancers occur in people who have never smoked, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.² And while lung cancer mostly affects older adults, 10% of people with this type of cancer are under 55 years old.

It doesn’t matter why someone has lung cancer, the Ondas believe. Cancer is still cancer, and everyone deserves support and care.

Heidi’s cancer was found almost by accident, but she was lucky. Others aren’t.

Despite how many people die of the disease each year, lung cancer screening rates, which can catch cancer early and save lives, are still stubbornly low. Only 18.2% of people who are eligible for a screening actually get one, according to the American Lung Association.³

From frustration to advocacy

In 2020, Heidi was trying to get involved in lung cancer advocacy and had approached some cancer centers to see whether they were doing any activities in November for Lung Cancer Awareness Month. “I was either being ignored or dismissed, or people told me they would get back to us and nobody did,” she said. “I felt humiliated.” 

So she asked Pierre to make her a wooden white ribbon—a symbol already associated with lung cancer awareness—to put on her front door. “I could at least educate people walking by my house,” she said, and since the ribbon was 2 feet tall and 1 foot wide, it was hard to miss. It proclaimed, loud and clear, “that someone in this house has lung cancer and wasn’t ashamed of it,” she said.

Heidi posted the picture to a Facebook group for lung cancer survivors in Colorado, and it went viral. The couple got requests from around the world for wooden ribbons, which they made and shipped at their own expense. “It evolved from what some would call a cute arts and crafts project to awareness,” she said.

As requests and costs mounted, they knew the self-funded model wasn’t sustainable. And they wanted to do more.

“We had connected with several other survivors, including women with a history of tobacco use, and caregivers, and it was really that small core group of us that got together and decided perhaps we did need to form a nonprofit in order to get more exposure,” Pierre said.

Becoming a nonprofit also enabled them to start receiving donations and grants, including from pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and genetics companies, to support their work.

In 2023, they received a grant through the Masonic Cancer Alliance, the outreach network of the University of Kansas Cancer Center, to help increase lung cancer screening rates in rural Kansas. The effort included billboards, medical education, and analysis of electronic health records to identify who was eligible for a screening and hadn’t gotten one.

Participating health centers in that area of Kansas had performed only 263 lung cancer screenings in 2022. That number jumped to 618 the first year of the project; the center had to buy two more screening machines to handle the volume.

Wiping away shame

The White Ribbon Project is now a multipronged effort. That still includes sending out large, wooden white ribbons—and the group has now distributed more than 10,000 in 44 countries.

The organization is also working to advocate on behalf of patients with lung cancer and call for better access to screening. They also host and support lung cancer awareness events at health care centers for Lung Cancer Awareness Month and partner with organizations to support their lung cancer work.

For the past two years, CHEST has partnered with The White Ribbon Project to display ribbons outside of CHEST headquarters in Glenview, Illinois, throughout November.

In addition to producing and distributing ribbons and orchestrating awareness events, the Ondas also speak at medical conferences. They want to expand eligibility for who can get lung cancer screenings because anyone with lungs can get lung cancer. Heidi is proof of that.

They also want lung cancer clinicians to become more active in this movement. “With their support,” Heidi said, “we can grow this movement and amount of awareness exponentially.”