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Innovation Grants

These grants are designed to provide critical and significant seed funding for experienced investigators with a novel and promising approach to finding causes and cures for childhood cancers. A Letter of Intent is required. The Innovation Award amount totals $250,000 over two years. The Award may not be renewed, however, one no cost extensions are allowable.

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Background
Neuroblastoma (NB) is the most common and deadly solid tumor of childhood. Unfortunately, most patients have metastatic disease, and many progress relentlessly despite intensive multimodality therapy. Many cytotoxic agents used to treat high-risk NB have serious short- and long-term toxicities, and very few new agents are in the pipeline. Nanoparticles (NPs) are drug delivery vehicles (50-200 nm) that passively target tumors based on the enhanced permeability of tumor blood vessels, and retention due to poor venous/lymphatic return (EPR effect).

Principal Investigator Name: 

Garrett M. Brodeur, MD

Project Title: 

Nanoparticle Delivery of Therapeutic Agents in Neuroblastomas

Year Awarded: 

2013

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Neuroblastoma (NB) is the cancer of the immature nerve cells. It affects mostly infants and children and, with the exception of brain tumors, is the most common solid tumor of the childhood, accounting for approximately 15% of all pediatric cancer deaths. Although some of the tumors dissolve spontaneously, for patients with high-risk neuroblastoma survival remains well below 40%, despite aggressive and rather debilitating therapy. This necessitates the development of new targeted therapies.

Principal Investigator Name: 

Andrei Thomas-Tikhonenko, PhD

Project Title: 

In-UTR mutations in neuroblastoma: Functional consequences and therapeutic implications

Year Awarded: 

2012

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

In many blood cancers, allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) represents the only treatment with the potential for cure. Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), however afflict between 30-80% of patients receiving allo-HSCT and remains a major cause of death. The primary cause of GVHD is known to be donor's immune cells, which can recognize recipient's tissues as foreign and attack indiscriminately, often targeting both cancer cells and normal tissues.

Principal Investigator Name: 

Marcel van den Brink, MD/PhD

Project Title: 

Targeting Neovascularization in Graft-Versus-Host Disease

Year Awarded: 

2012

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

Files: 

PDF icon 12.12 van den Brink Blood.pdf

University of California, San Diego

Over 100 billion blood cells are generated every day from our bone marrow.  Paradoxically, these vast numbers of cells derive from an exceedingly rare population of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that both self-renew and generate all blood and immune cell types for life.  The characteristics and functions of these remarkable cells are highly conserved in all vertebrate animals.  Our laboratory utilizes the unique attributes of the zebrafish embryo to study the biology of HSCs in new ways.  By creating transgenic zebrafish expressing fluorescent proteins we can now observe the behaviors of

Principal Investigator Name: 

David Traver, MD

Project Title: 

Modeling Pediatric Leukemia in the Zebrafish to Enable Discovery of New Anti-Leukemic Compounds

Year Awarded: 

2012

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

An abnormal number of chromosomes, or aneuploidy, is the most common cytogenetic abnormality in cancer. Aneuploidy is observed in 70% of hematologic malignancies and 95% of solid tumors. The ability to target cells based on their chromosome content, consequently, presents a unique and unexploited opportunity in cancer therapeutics. The work we propose in this renewal grant will significantly advance our goal of identifying methods to selectively target and kill aneuploid cancer cells.

Principal Investigator Name: 

David Pellman, MD

Project Title: 

Identification and validation of new therapeutic targets in pediatric leukemia through an aneuploidy-based synthetic lethality screen

Year Awarded: 

2012

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

Huntsman Cancer Institute

Using a unique and powerful resource that combines genealogy from the 1800s with statewide cancer reporting from 1966 (the Utah Population Database or UPDB), we have identified very large families that have more cases of Ewing's Sarcoma than would be expected given the low rates of this cancer; we call these high-risk Ewing's Sarcoma pedigrees.  The Ewing's Sarcoma cases in these families may all share a genetic change that they all inherited from a common ancestor, who is responsible for their cancer.

Principal Investigator Name: 

Lisa Cannon-Albright, PhD

Project Title: 

Identification of predisposition genes for Ewing sarcoma segregating in high-risk pedigrees

Year Awarded: 

2012

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), an aggressive childhood cancer, is the most common soft tissue malignancy in children, accounting for 5-10% of all pediatric tumors. The most common form of RMS is the embryonal subtype (eRMS), representing nearly two-thirds of RMSs.  RMS is thought to be initiated from muscle stem cells because the tumor expresses skeletal muscle markers. During the analysis of transgenic mice expressing activated Shh signaling in the brain, we serendipitously discovered that these mice exhibited RMS with 100% incidence.

Principal Investigator Name: 

Chin Chiang, PhD

Project Title: 

A novel mouse model of rhabdomyosarcoma

Year Awarded: 

2012

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

University of Miami Miller School of Medicine

Medulloblastoma is the most common childhood brain cancer, forty percent of which is caused by activated Hedgehog (HH) or WNT signaling pathways.  These two signaling pathways are also two of the most common pathways activated in cancer, providing the driving force for the growth and maintenance of cancer stem cells -- the cells proposed to be resistant to chemotherapy and radiotherapy that ultimately leads to cancer relapse.  Thus the targeted attenuation of these signaling pathways could tremendously improve the outcome of such therapy.

Principal Investigator Name: 

David Robbins, PhD

Project Title: 

Casein Kinase 1 alpha Agonists as Novel Medulloblastoma Inhibitors

Year Awarded: 

2012

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

Baylor College of Medicine

T-cell ALL is among the most frequent of child-hood leukemias, and a significant sub-set of patients are not effectively treated by conventional therapies.  A subset of T-ALL with a particularly poor prognosis is associated with over-expression of the LYL1 gene, however, the role of LYL1 has been little studied.  In this project, we propose to study the role of LYL1 in T-ALL.  We have found that mice that lack the mouse Lyl1 gene show defective development of T-cells, which are the precursors of T-ALL leukemia.  We also found that when we forced Lyl1 to be expressed, we generated more T-cel

Principal Investigator Name: 

Margaret Goodell, PhD

Project Title: 

Mechanisms of LYL1-associated T-ALL development

Year Awarded: 

2012

Cancer Research Category: 

Category of Grant: 

Medical, Nurse Researcher, Quality of LIfe: 

Institution: 

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