Posted on August 9, 2008

St. Baldrick's Foundation Awards $12.6 Million in Grants, Fellowships

The St. Baldrick's Foundation in Pasadena, California, has announced grants and fellowships totaling $12.6 million to support childhood cancer research.

The grants included an award of $6 million to CureSearch Children's Oncology Group (COG) for cooperative research and $250,000 for the Translational Genomics in Neuroblastoma research project. More than $5.2 million of the COG grant will be distributed to some two hundred institutions, including the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, to support their participation in COG clinical trials.

The foundation also awarded one-year research grants to fourteen institutions, including the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Florida, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and the Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital. New two-year pediatric oncology fellowships, which may be extended for a third year, were awarded to individuals at eleven institutions, including the University of Chicago, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Washington University in St. Louis.

For the first time, the foundation awarded twelve Career Development Awards. The three-year awards are designed to further the research of promising pediatric oncologists by bridging the funding gap between their fellowships and sources of funding available to more established researchers, and may be extended for an additional two years.

"The ever-increasing generosity of our supporters has enabled us to fund more grants and fellowships while introducing both the Career Development Award and funding the promising new Translational Genomics in Neuroblastoma research," said St. Baldrick's Foundation executive director Kathleen Ruddy. "We hope these grants lead the way to major developments in how childhood cancer is diagnosed and treated — giving kids a longer, higher quality of life. Our ultimate goal is to find cures for all childhood cancers."