This grant funds a medical student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. JMML is a rare type of childhood cancer that is really hard to cure. Right now, even our best treatments only stop this cancer for a year or so before it starts to come back. Cancers can be studied in specific models, which allow researchers to try out different drugs and treatments to see what works. The goal of this project is to use these models to find new treatments for JMML.

This grant is named for the St. Baldrick's Foundation Staff whose generous gifts have helped fund this opportunity and may encourage students to choose childhood cancer research as a specialty.

This grant funds an undergraduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Raman spectroscopy (RS) is used to characterize different types of cancer tissue. Usually RS fingerprints are obtained when a slice of cancer tissue is examined under a microscope. With a new design as a portable hand-held RS probe, the St. Baldrick's Foundation Summer Fellow will use the probe to determine RS fingerprints in cancer cell cultures. If successful, the project results could be used to design uses of the probe in the clinic setting to detect cancer cells in blood or other fluids.

This grant funds a student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. There has been little success in curing high risk AML patients, with survival rates remaining at < 25%. This highlights our current reliance on highly intensive cytotoxic therapies and stem cell transplant, and their inadequacies. This project studies the combination of novel target discovery with state-of-the-art stem cell expansion technology. Protein science provides a unique opportunity to generate one of the most impactful therapeutic discoveries in childhood AML in the last 40 years, with minimal toxicity. The summer intern will assist in investigating the impact of drugs on cancer targets while minimizing toxicity toward healthy cells. Results will be used to help identify critical genes involved in cancer growth and disease resistance, and to leverage future work in drug development.

This grant funds an undergraduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Children with aggressive neuroblastoma have poor cure rates despite intensive treatment, and new therapies are needed. Treatments that inhibit important proteins and pathways in neuroblastoma tumors are likely to be more effective with fewer side effects. Kinases are proteins that control signals in cancer cells, leading to cancer cell growth and spread. This study proposes to test a certain inhibitor to determine its effectiveness against neuroblastoma cells and tumors. The results of these studies will determine whether BLU-667 is effective against neuroblastoma, potentially leading to clinical trials using BLU-667 for treatment of children with neuroblastoma.

This grant funds an undergraduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. This project will validate a drug for the medulloblastoma, a type of brain tumor, specifically tumors that spread from the original cerebellar location to the covering of the brain and spine (the meninges).

This grant is named for the St. Baldrick's Foundation Staff whose generous gifts have helped fund this opportunity and may encourage students to choose childhood cancer research as a specialty.

This grant funds an undergraduate student and medical student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia is a deadly childhood cancer that affects blood cells. The current treatment uses highly toxic medications. The goal of the proposed project is to test the efficacy of a novel, less toxic, targeted treatment for T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. This award will train the student to perform experiments to test the efficacy of the novel treatment in T-cell leukemia and to determine the mechanisms of drug action against leukemia cells.

This grant funds an undergraduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Children diagnosed with leukemia are often effectively treated in the beginning, but later relapse with their disease. Scientists now feel that this is in part due to the sanctuary that the bone marrow (BM) provides the leukemia cells. This prevents complete elimination and can set children up for relapse. This study aims to understand how the BM protects leukemia cells. Once we have identified the mechanisms by which that happens we can then begin to develop drugs to prevent it. This lab has recently identified an inflammatory process by which leukemia cells change the BM function and think this is a root cause of disease persistence and relapse. The project will test this hypothesis and find out how to prevent the leukemia from changing the BM and causing relapse.

This grant funds a student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. This lab specializes in harnessing the power of a particular type of immune cells called macrophages and microglia which are the body's scavengers. This is done by blocking a "don't eat me" signal called CD47. The CD47 protein acts as a "don't eat me" signal to macrophages which normally engulf and devour cancer cells and other diseased and dying cells. It turns out that nearly every kind of cancer uses CD47 to evade these macrophages. Covering up the CD47 a "don't eat me" protein allows the immune cells to find and swallow cancer cells. Here we will test whether the ability of macrophages to eat tumor cells can be increased by blocking another immune dampening molecule called adenosine which is rapidly increased by tumor cells as they grow.

This grant funds a student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common and highly lethal bone cancer affecting children and adolescent populations. New therapies are desperately needed for this highly aggressive disease, as outcome for metastatic OS has not improved over the past few decades despite the utilization of aggressive combination chemotherapy. The summer fellow will focus on testing a novel CA-IX small molecule inhibitor using syngeneic OS tumors in vitro and in vivo. Activities generated through this Summer Fellowship grant will lay the foundation for pre-clinical data for the use of CA-IX inhibitor in future clinical trials.

This grant funds an undergraduate student and a medical student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Neuroblastoma is a pediatric tumor in which a large subset has very poor survival. Researchers are trying to understand what makes this subset so deadly and have developed a system to test combinations of genes apart and together to determine how they could make certain neuroblastoma more aggressive. They will test whether certain mutations may make the neuroblastoma tumor cells more invasive and if these mutations could cause other critical gene expression changes in high risk neuroblastoma.

This grant funds two undergraduate students to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Tumors have extensive mutations in their DNA which play important roles in cancer development. Particular mutations that are frequently found in tumors are likely important for promoting cancer development. BubR1 is a protein that regulates the proper separation of DNA during cell division, and therefore plays an important role in suppressing cancer formation. A mutation in BubR1 (R249Q) is specifically observed in approximately 15% of pediatric cancers and is not found in adult cancers. Researchers will study this mutation and results may identify a unique mechanism of tumor development controlled by BubR1 specifically during developmental processes, uniquely promoting pediatric cancer. This project will provide an opportunity for these two students to spend the summer performing biomedical science research utilizing well-established and easy to learn techniques, to enhance their excitement in pediatric cancer research.

This grant funds an undergraduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Ewing sarcoma is a cancer that primarily occurs in children, adolescents, and young adults. While we don't know why certain people get Ewing sarcoma, we do know that most patients have the same problem with genes in their cancer cell. Just as genes affect your eye color, the Ewing sarcoma cells have a special gene, EWS-FLI1, that keeps the cancer growing. EWS-FLI1 is critical for Ewing sarcoma cells to survive. If you turn off EWS-FLI1, Ewing sarcoma cells die. This project will study exactly how YK-4-279, a chemical in a new drug in clinical trials, affects key survival processes, called transcription and splicing, to enable design of optimized drugs.

This grant is named for the St. Baldrick's Foundation Staff whose generous gifts have helped fund this opportunity and may encourage students to choose childhood cancer research as a specialty.

This grant funds a medical student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Pediatric glioblastoma (p-GBM) is a lethal brain tumor that can affect children. This cancer is difficult to treat due to several factors, including the tumor's resistance to conventional therapies as well as the sensitivity of the surrounding healthy brain tissue. Children who undergo surgery to remove the brain tumor live an additional three to six years on average, though the quality of life may be low. Phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) is a protein family that normally regulates cell replication and survival. However, when it functions incorrectly, cells can experience unchecked growth and cause cancer. Inhibiting this protein family is a viable treatment option for cancer but blocking the whole PI3K family has severe side effects. It is imperative to understand each member of the PI3K family to better develop treatments that involve them.

This grant funds two students to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. The experience may encourage them to choose childhood cancer research as a specialty.

Project 1: Neuroblastomas are an enigmatic cancer of childhood with subtypes that have extremely good or poor survival. Poor prognosis neuroblastomas contain normal immune cells that help tumors grow. Important questions are 1) what is the repertoire of immune cells in neuroblastomas at time of diagnosis, 2) how the interplay between normal and tumor cells changes when tumors recur. The Summer Fellow will analyze images of tumors at recurrence and compare to the diagnosis images. These findings will provide insights into the types of immune cells that cancer cells rely on and may allow identification of new targets of therapy.

Project 2: Decline in brain function may happen after irradiation to the brain in children. It is hard to predict the extent and speed by which it happens. There is suggestion that more rapid injury happens in areas with iron deposition. Using a novel MRI method that allows chemical identification and quantification of iron in the brain, the Summer Fellow will characterize the imaging changes in white matter of the brain in children who have been treated with radiation for their brain tumors. This will allow to then correlate the changes with future outcome of their cognitive function.

This grant funds an undergraduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. DIPG's are the worst type of brain cancer children can get; there is no cure. This project will try a new approach to change that. Using large publicly available datasets from large experiments, 4 drugs have been identified that theoretically can slow down the growth of DIPG tumors. Researchers will test these four drugs against several DIPG models generated from patients. If results are positive, this could lead to new treatments for this deadly disease.

This grant funds a medical student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. This year it is estimated that 800 children will be diagnosed with osteosarcoma (bone cancer). The lab has identified a gene (WNT5B) that is too high in a subset of osteosarcomas. By making a cell line that removes WNT5B, the lab will compare its growth to the original cells and target this gene in those cancers that have it to design a specific targeted therapy.

This grant funds an undergraduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is a type of children's brain tumor that currently has no cure or effective therapeutic options. This proposal aims to understand whether the target drug of ONC201, ClpP, can be targeted using novel compounds representing new potential therapeutics in DIPG.

This grant funds an undergraduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. High risk neuroblastoma remains a challenge to cure with only 50% survival, despite multi-modality treatment. Natural killer (NK) cells have been previously shown to have activity versus neuroblastoma but have not been consistently successful in clinical trials. In similar fashion to how people receive flu shots, this project will treat bone marrow transplant recipients with 3 doses of a vaccine, with or without anti-PD1 therapy to stimulate T and NK cells, to introduce their immune system to what neuroblastoma looks like, so in the event this tumor tries to grow, the immune system will stop it and kill it before making the patient sick.

This grant is named for the St. Baldrick's Foundation Staff whose generous gifts have helped fund this opportunity and may encourage students to choose childhood cancer research as a specialty.

This grant funds a medical school student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. The experience may encourage them to choose childhood cancer research as a specialty. Therapies that stimulate the immune system to target cancer cells are rapidly providing new and efficacious treatment options for pediatric patients with cancer. However, scientists are finding that solid tumors have evolved methods of inhibiting the immune system, minimizing the effects of these new therapies. One way of suppressing the immune system is through the upregulation of myeloid-derived suppressor cells. This study will help determine the prevalence and function of these cells in pediatric patients with solid tumors so that they can be specifically targeted to improve the efficacy of new immunotherapies.

This grant funds a graduate student to complete work in pediatric oncology research for the summer. The experience may encourage them to choose childhood cancer research as a specialty. Millions of cells are formed every day in the developing brain of children. Medulloblastoma, a pediatric tumor, occurs when the proliferation of cells in the cerebellum (a lower part of the brain) becomes uncontrolled. The Notch pathway is a key mechanism that governs cell proliferation in many biological contexts. Aberrant up-regulation of Notch signals is associated with medulloblastoma. Re-gaining control of Notch could help cure medulloblastoma patients. The goal of the Rual laboratory is to better understand the molecular mechanisms that control Notch signals in brain cells and, thus, to define novel therapeutic targets for the benefit of medulloblastoma patients. This lab recently identified the L3MBTL3 gene as a new modulator of Notch signals. Importantly, previous studies have shown that the L3MBTL3 genes is deleted in medulloblastoma patients. These researchers hypothesize that the L3MBTL3 deletions observed in medulloblastoma patients result in the aberrant regulation of Notch signals, thus supporting tumorigenesis. In this project, the student is helping to test this hypothesis by studying the extent to which inhibiting L3MBTL3 modulate medulloblastoma tumor progression in models of medulloblastoma.