Hayman Foundation Supports Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation as a Founding Sponsor of the Childhood Cancer Data Lab

ALSF receives $100,000 gift from Hayman Foundation to fund data lab initiative.

Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) announces today the Hayman Foundation has donated $100,000 to fund the first-of-its-kind Childhood Cancer Data Lab (CCDL). The Hayman Foundation joins ALSF in support of the CCDL as a Founding Sponsor. The CCDL launched in August 2017 with the mission of harmonizing publically available data to accelerate finding cures for all kids with cancer.

Continuing to fill critical funding gaps in the childhood cancer community, ALSF’s investment in technology, with the help of the Hayman Foundation, allows data scientists, researchers and computer engineers to work together to harness the power of big data and computers to find solutions to treating childhood cancer.

There is enough publicly available childhood cancer disease data at the National Institutes of Health to fill up several hundred Libraries of Congress. The CCDL has created a tool, called refine.bio, to organize the data into one format. Now, researchers across the globe can efficiently access and analyze this data, for free, to identify common patterns. In turn, they hope this collaborative dataset will accelerate the development of new therapies to cure childhood cancers. Since the launch of the data lab and refine.bio, the CCDL has processed over 150,000+ childhood cancer data samples.

“The data refinery, refine.bio, is now processing data that initially cost $2 million to generate every hour, making it available to cancer researchers everywhere,” said Casey Greene, Director of the CCDL.

Some ALSF-funded researchers have already received training on utilizing the CCDL’s resources. Dr. Stephen Mack, PhD, an ALSF ‘A’ Award Grantee, will use the data analysis techniques he received during training in his ALSF-funded research. “Having more data in one place and being able to access it the same way as anyone else and being able to work with that data and our collaborators is an important aspect that will advance research,” said Stephen Mack of Baylor College of Medicine.

Motivated by a personal connection to childhood cancer, the Hayman Foundation is excited to become a founding sponsor of the CCDL. “The Hayman Foundation has followed with awe for many years, the work that Jay and Liz Scott have done in memory of their daughter, Alex,” said Harry Hayman, III, a Hayman Family Foundation Trustee. “The need for this innovation has been apparent to many in the field for years, and Alex’s dedication was able to make it happen.”

For more information on the Childhood Cancer Data Lab, visit AlexsLemonade.org/data-lab.