Pietro's Fight

Pietro's Fight

Dayna and Manni Scarso founded Pietro's Fight after their son, born May 14, 2009, was diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, the most common fatal genetic disorder among children. The organization operates from a clear personal mandate: convert a family's urgent search for a cure into a funding engine for drug development and awareness. The entity deploys capital primarily into venture-stage therapeutic research targeting Duchenne. Its model blends grant-making with disease-awareness campaigns, positioning the organization as both a funder and an advocacy platform. The group backed work that contributed to the FDA's 2016 approval of Exondys 51, a milestone treatment for a subset of DMD patients (per the firm website). The geographic footprint is rooted in the United States, with operations and community engagement concentrated in the New York metropolitan area. Team size and total deployment figures remain undisclosed. The Scarsos drive the organization alongside an advisory structure listed on its website. The group runs an active events calendar — raffles and an annual 5K run — to sustain fundraising, and news updates from September 2022 confirm public celebration of incremental regulatory wins tied to the research it supports. Unlike a pure grant-making foundation, Pietro's Fight operates with the hands-on urgency of a family office allocating to a single-disease thesis. Its structural differentiator is this dual identity: a parent-led funding vehicle that blends donor-directed research bets with direct patient-community mobilization, a model where the limited partners are essentially the affected families and their networks.