To accelerate breakthroughs, the Damon Runyon Foundation provides today's best young scientists with funds to pursue innovative cancer research.
- Today’s Promising Areas of Cancer Research
- What is Cancer?
- A Broken Pipeline?
A Generation of Science at Risk
- ARISE Report
Early Career Scientists and High-Risk, High Reward Research - American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Why We’re Losing the War on Cancer (And How To Win It)
Clifton Leaf - Fortune Magazine
July 17, 2006
Scott A. Armstrong, MD, PhD (Damon Runyon-Lilly Clinical Investigator '03-'08) and colleagues have isolated rare cancer stem cells that cause leukemia in mouse models of the disease. Contrary to current dogma, Dr. Armstrong's work supports the idea that leukemia stem cells do not have to originate from normal blood stem cells. This is an important finding, because it indicates that normal stem cells can be distinguished from leukemia stem cells and spared during cancer treatment.
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Pardis C. Sabeti, MD, DPhil (Damon Runyon Fellow '04-'06) completed her medical degree from Harvard Medical School, graduating summa cum laude (the highest honors that the institution can bestow upon a graduate) in recognition of her work to identify and analyze the signatures of natural selection that exist in the human genome. This distinction, which began in 1940, is reserved for the single most deserving student among a graduating class and is not automatically awarded every year. In fact, in nearly two decades, there have been only eight other recipients. According to medical school records, Sabeti is the third woman to graduate summa cum laude since the school admitted its first group of female medical students in 1945.