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The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation celebrated 75 years of funding cancer research at Gotham Hall in New York on June 1, 2022. The event raised nearly $1 million to support promising early-career scientists pursuing innovative strategies to prevent, diagnose, and treat all forms of cancer.
Immune checkpoint inhibitors work by releasing the “brakes” on immune T cells, unleashing them upon cancer cells. After the discovery of two of these brakes, PD-1 and CTLA-4, and the subsequent cascade of drugs targeting them, the search for new checkpoints to target stalled. But this spring, the FDA approved a new melanoma drug called relatlimab, which targets LAG-3—the first new checkpoint in almost a decade.
Just before dawn on Monday, October 4, 2021, David Julius, PhD, a longtime Damon Runyon mentor and former Fellowship Award Committee member, and Ardem Patapoutian, PhD, a former Damon Runyon awardee, received news that they had won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The award recognized the two scientists’ independent “discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.” Ardem and his team at Scripps Research discovered the Piezo channel proteins, essential for our sense of touch. For David, the Nobel culminated over three decades of research at the University of California, San Francisco, on the proteins that help us sense temperature and pain.
Three scientists with exceptional promise and novel approaches to fighting cancer have been named the 2022 recipients of the Damon Runyon Physician-Scientist Training Award. The awardees were selected through a highly competitive and rigorous process by a scientific committee comprised of leading cancer researchers who are themselves physician-scientists.
Damon Runyon scientists and industry partners gathered in person and virtually on Thursday, May 19 for the 2022 Accelerating Cancer Cures Symposium, hosted by Merck in South San Francisco.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), established in 1863, is the body of distinguished researchers “charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology.” Election to membership is among the highest honors a scientist can receive. This year, eight Damon Runyon alumni join the NAS ranks, bringing the total number of Damon Runyon alumni in NAS to 97.
It is with sadness that we announce the passing of Damon Runyon alumnus, Emeritus Board Member, and Nobel Laureate Sidney Altman, PhD. He was 82.
Damon Runyon has announced its newest cohort of Quantitative Biology Fellows, three exceptional early-career scientists who are applying the tools of computational science to generate and interpret cancer research data at extraordinary scale and resolution. Whether measuring cell-to-cell genetic variability within a tumor or developing algorithms that can predict if therapy will be effective, their projects extend the boundaries of what is possible in cancer research, allowing them to tackle fundamental biological and clinical questions.
The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has announced ten recipients of the 2022 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 initial grants of $400,000 over two years have been awarded to six extraordinary early-career researchers (four individuals and one collaborative team), each of whom will have the opportunity to receive two additional years of funding (for a total of $800,000). This year, “Stage 2” continuation support was granted to four Innovators who demonstrated significant progress on their proposed research during the first two years of the award.
When Megan Miller was twenty weeks pregnant, the doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) noticed her baby was unusually large for his gestation age. After further examination, Megan was informed that he likely had a condition known as Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome—a diagnosis she had never heard of. Naturally, the expecting mother consulted Google, where she found alarmingly little information. “The only place that had good scientific facts,” she recalls, “was CHOP’s website.”
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