Grants Search Results

As the recipient of the Rosa and Francesco Romanello St. Baldrick's Research Grant, Dr. Lawlor is studying an aggressive tumor called Ewing sarcoma that occurs most often in teenagers. It usually starts in a bone and then can spread or metastasize throughout the body. Once it has spread, the chances of cure are very poor. She is studying how the tumor cells change the surrounding normal tissues to allow the tumor cells to leave the bone and spread to other sites in the body. Results so far have shown that the tumor cells and the normal tissues "talk to each other" and that this crosstalk is likely to be essential for the growth and spread of the tumor, both within the bone as well as in other tissues. Dr. Lawlor will decipher these messages, and the instructions they convey, so that new therapies can be developed that will intercept them and block tumor spread. This grant is named in recognition of Salvatore Romanello for his decade of service as pro bono general counsel to the St. Baldrick's Foundation. He has chosen to name the grant in honor of his parents who instilled in him the values of generosity and caring for a greater cause.

Atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor (AT/RT) is a highly malignant brain tumor that has a very poor prognosis despite aggressive treatment. The development of new, effective therapeutic approaches for AT/RT has been hindered by a lack of specific therapeutic targets. It is necessary to find effective therapeutic targets, preferably based on the understanding of the molecular mechanisms that promote this highly malignant brain tumor. A tumor suppressor gene (SMARCB1) is absent in the majority of AT/RT and loss of this gene leads to factors that promote tumor growth. This research involving genetic and pharmacologic inhibition of histone binding proteins (EZH2 and BRD4) is of high importance for developing effective therapies for pediatric patients with AT/RT. Dr. Hashizume will determine whether therapeutic combination of targeting two histone binding proteins, BRD4 and EZH2, provides synergistic benefits, and will inform how best to maximize the clinical potential of combination therapy for effective treatment of children with AT/RT. This research will also test how tumors adapt to this molecular targeted therapy, to ultimately inform clinicians how to treat tumors that have resistance to molecular targeted therapy. Finally, this project will explore how this combination therapy interacts with radiation in treating AT/RT, which is important due to the frequent use of radiation in treating AT/RT. This grant is generously supported by the “Just Do It…and be done with it” St. Baldrick’s Hero Fund created in honor of Sara Martorano who was four years old when she was diagnosed with Stage IV Wilms tumor. Thanks to research, today she is cancer free. This fund celebrates the courage of cancer kids through treatment and the support of their family and friends.

Although many children being treated for cancer initially respond to therapy, cancer cells often become resistant to chemotherapy drugs. Drug resistance is a major cause of cancer relapse, recurrence, and treatment failure. Dr. Gordon's goal is to identify new approaches to block, or reverse, resistance to an important class of cancer drugs. He has already identified one approach to reverse resistance in the laboratory, which he is now testing in models of cancer. Dr. Gordon is also testing a large number of additional drugs for the ability to prevent or reverse resistance.

NUT midline carcinoma (NMC) is a deadly cancer that affects children and young adults, with a survival of less than 7 months. NMC is caused by a protein called BRD4-NUT that changes the structure of DNA in such a way that the DNA drives expression of cancer-associated genes that promote growth of NMC. Dr. French proposes to determine what is actually happening to the structure of the DNA that allows it to express the cancer-driving genes. There are two protein types he suspects are helping BRD4-NUT distort the DNA conformation; these are called HDACs and HATs. Dr. French's team will use state-of-the-art inhibitors that target specific HDACs and HATs to determine their respective roles and help identify novel therapeutics to treat this incurable disease.

Cure rates for pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) have remained at or below 60% for decades, and the largest reason for treatment failure is relapsed disease. Once relapse happens, it is very difficult to cure the disease. It is well known that interactions between AML cells and the non-cancerous supportive cells in the bone marrow, called stromal cells, can protect leukemia cells from chemotherapy. Dr. Redell's team reported that an enzyme in AML cells, called spleen tyrosine kinase (SYK), is turned on when AML cells contact stromal cells, and SYK helps AML cells survive chemotherapy. She will further investigate this enzyme, using a large panel of AML cells that come directly from pediatric patients. The drug company Gilead Sciences has given Dr. Redell a supply of their new SYK inhibitor, entospletinib, to test in her studies. To make sure that the results of the drug testing are related to blocking SYK, she also has made some AML cells that do not make SYK. Dr. Redell's team will do experiments to learn how SYK helps AML cells resist chemotherapy, and they will test entospletinib in AML models to determine if it might be a good drug to add to chemotherapy for patients.

Do you ever get a cold sore on your lip, or know someone who does? That sore is caused by a virus that destroys the cells in your lip. As the virus spreads, the sore gets bigger. Viruses are great at killing cells and spreading. But, the sore eventually goes away because the immune system attacks the infected cells, killing them and stopping the viral infection, allowing your lip to heal. Imagine if we could get both the virus and the immune system to kill cancer cells instead of lip cells! Previously Dr. Haworth's team used a safe version of the cold sore virus to infect a common type of hard-to-treat childhood cancer cells. The virus directly killed cancer cells and caused the immune system to attack the cancer cells that the virus missed. Dr. Haworth's team is testing ways to make the virus and immune system work better together. Dr. Haworth is infecting model tumors with the virus, and giving immune cells designed to attack the tumor, hypothesizing that giving both virus and immune cells will cure the tumor. Awarded at The Research Institute at Nationwide and transferred to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: Reducing Ethnic Disparities in Acute Leukemia (REDIAL) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX.

Only 45% of children with high-risk neuroblastoma (NB) are cured. The New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) consortium links laboratory and clinical investigators to develop therapies with high potential for improving survival and performs the first testing of these treatments at 14 neuroblastoma centers in North America and 3 in Australia, United Kingdom, and France. NANT studies aim 1) to enhance the ability of the immune system to eliminate NB by targeting both NB cells and surrounding normal cells that help tumor cells grow and resist treatments; 2) to improve treatment of NB using small molecule drugs that target NB gene abnormalities that “drive” tumor aggressiveness including abnormal/mutated ALK protein or abnormally increased MYCN protein; and 3) to use molecular biology to define new treatment targets in NB and normal cells that enhance NB growth and resistance to therapy to improve prediction of outcome with a “biomarker” test for NB cells in blood and bone marrow. The NANT consortium anticipates that these innovative studies will improve survival for children with high-risk neuroblastoma.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

This institution is a member of a research consortium which is being funded by St. Baldrick's: New Approaches to Neuroblastoma Therapy (NANT) Consortium. For a description of this project, see the consortium grant made to the lead institution: Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.