Posted on April 9, 2013

Stand Up To Cancer, St. Baldrick’s Foundation Award $14.5 Million for Childhood Cancer Research

Stand Up To Cancer and the St. Baldrick’s Foundation have announced a four-year, $14.5 million grant to create a “Dream Team” dedicated to childhood cancer research.

The grant will support efforts to bring together researchers from two disciplines of translational pediatric cancer research — genomics and immunotherapeutics — that historically have functioned independently of each other. With support from SU2C’s scientific partner, the American Association for Cancer search, the Immunogenomics to Create New Therapies for High-Risk Childhood Cancers initiative will seek to combine recent advances in understanding the genetic basis of certain aggressive childhood cancers with efforts to harness the body’s own defenses against cancer. Institutions participating in the initiative include Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the National Cancer Institute, the British Columbia Cancer Agency, Baylor College of Medicine, the Hospital for Sick Children, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and the University of Wisconsin.

Led by John M. Maris, director of the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the research team will create a multi-institutional computing infrastructure to analyze which molecules are found on the surface of cancer cells but not normal cells, then develop new immunotherapeutic drugs and approaches in collaboration with the NCI’s Frederick National Laboratory and industry partners. The project is scheduled to begin this July, with the first clinical trials starting within a year.

“This Dream Team united top-tier researchers across North America in a multidimensional campaign that uses the best of basic science to create new therapeutics, while at the same time initiating multiple cutting-edge clinical trials of immunotherapy for deadly pediatric cancers,” said Crystal L. Mackall, chief of the NCI’s pediatric oncology branch and co-leader of the project. “We are confident that this combined approach will lead to novel therapies that will improve outcomes for some of the most lethal childhood cancers.”

“Stand Up To Cancer and the St. Baldrick’s Foundation Announce New Pediatric Cancer Dream Team.” Stand Up to Cancer Press Release 4/07/13.

Primary Subject: Medical Research
Secondary Subject(s): Children and Youth, Health
Location(s): Bethesda, British Columbia, California, Canada, Houston, Los Angeles, Madison, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Seattle, Texas, Toronto, Washington, Wisconsin