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Damon Runyon scientists and industry partners gathered on Thursday, March 27, for the 2025 Accelerating Cancer Cures Symposium, hosted by Novartis in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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New Discoveries
Patients with kidney disease who are undergoing dialysis often need to take a drug called a calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR) agonist to regain normal calcium levels in their blood. Unfortunately, inhibiting CaSR can sometimes reduce calcium levels too much, resulting in a condition known as hypocalcemia that carries serious adverse side effects. A major question in pharmacology, then, is how to modulate CaSR activity such that patients receive the benefits and not the risks.
Honors and Awards
The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has named 13 new Damon Runyon Fellows, exceptional postdoctoral scientists conducting basic and translational cancer research in the laboratories of leading senior investigators. The prestigious, four-year Fellowship encourages the nation's most promising young scientists to pursue careers in cancer research by providing them with independent funding ($300,000 total) to investigate cancer causes, mechanisms, therapies, and prevention.
Honors and Awards
The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have announced their newest class of pediatric cancer research fellows, each of whom will receive funding for four years ($300,000 total) to support an innovative research project with the potential to significantly impact the diagnosis or treatment of one or more pediatric cancers.
New Discoveries
Research has uncovered many strategies that cancer cells use to survive and proliferate in the body, from rewiring their metabolism to recruiting neighboring healthy cells to suppress the immune system. Recently, Damon Runyon alumnus and current Innovation Award Committee Member Howard Y. Chang, MD, PhD, and his colleagues at Stanford University, including Damon Runyon Fellow Xiaowei Yan, PhD, unveiled yet another strategy. Cancer cells store genes in circular pieces of DNA, known as extrachromosomal DNA or ecDNA, that defy the laws of genetics.
Honors and Awards
The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has announced eight recipients of the 2025 Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, established to support high-risk, high-reward ideas with the potential to significantly impact the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of cancer. Five extraordinary early-career researchers will receive initial grants of $400,000 over two years, and each will have the opportunity to receive two additional years of funding (for a potential total of $800,000).
New Discoveries
Metastatic tumors, which arise when a cancer spreads from the original tissue throughout the body, tend to be less responsive to therapy than primary tumors. Metastasis is often lethal for this reason, accounting for over 90 percent of cancer deaths. But given that primary and metastatic tumors within the same patient have the same genetic mutations, it is not clear why metastatic tumors are more aggressive.
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The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation is thrilled to continue our partnership with the Timmerman Traverse, an adventurous initiative that brings leaders and investors in biotech together to scale extraordinary heights.
New Discoveries
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where former Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Cassian Yee, MD, runs his lab, is home to the Moon Shots program, a cancer research initiative inspired by America's drive toward space in the 1960s. Recently, Dr. Yee and his colleagues announced a project that combines these two ambitions: sending T cells into space to inform the development of new cancer treatments.
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