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Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has announced the 2021 recipients of the Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator award—six outstanding early career physician-scientists working to develop new cancer therapies under the mentorship of the nation's leading scientists and clinicians.
Note: This is an extended version of an interview published in the Spring 2021 issue of our print newsletter, Momentum.
Former Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Li Li, MD, PhD, MPH has been appointed to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a sixteen-member panel of experts that makes recommendations for screenings and other preventive healthcare measures for the entire U.S. population. He spoke with us about the role of prevention in the continuum of cancer care.
ArvCon, now in its seventh year, is a weekend featuring multiple tabletop roleplaying game sessions, a concert, giveaways, and other surprises, benefiting the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. Damon Runyon’s award programs are targeted to have the greatest impact on cancer research, providing critical early career support to researchers pursuing work with a high potential to impact all types of cancer. Damon Runyon’s mission is to foster new generations of elite scientists and fill gaps in traditional research funding that threaten future breakthroughs.
Five scientists with exceptional promise and novel approaches to fighting cancer have been named the 2021 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.
In addition to his Damon Runyon-funded research project, which aims to optimize the delivery of the chemotherapy drug cisplatin, Quantitative Biology Fellow Vitor Mori, PhD, has dedicated some of his efforts over the past year to addressing the COVID-19 crisis in his home city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The most populous city in the Western and Southern hemispheres, Sao Paolo has been struck particularly hard by the pandemic – Brazil’s COVID-19 death toll is second only to the United States.
The second class of Damon Runyon Quantitative Biology Fellows, announced this month, will apply the tools of computational biology to generate and interpret cancer research data at extraordinary scale and resolution. From RNA sequencing data that pinpoints tumor cells to their exact location to three-dimensional models of cell-cell interaction, their projects extend the boundaries of what is possible in cancer research, allowing them to tackle fundamental biological and clinical questions.
The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is the oldest and largest cancer research organization in the world. Its Fellows, selected through a rigorous peer review process, are scientists from a range of disciplines whose work has “propelled significant innovation and progress against cancer.”
Damon Runyon is delighted to announce the unanimous election of Carlos Arteaga, MD, and Levi Garraway, MD, PhD, to its Board of Directors.
In early April, Damon Runyon Quantitative Biology Fellows and distinguished leaders from our selection committee discussed pioneering a new field at the nexus of laboratory-based cancer research and data science.
Founded in 1908, The American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious medical honor societies. Each year, the ASCI Council elects up to eighty new members from hundreds of physician-scientists nominated on the basis of “outstanding scholarly achievement.” Among those chosen this year were five Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator alumni and one of our current sponsors. They will be formally inducted into the Society on April 8, 2021.