Runyon Foundation Issues $3.6 Million in Grants to Early Career Investigators

The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation awarded a total of $3.6 million to 9 winners of the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Awards. The grants support investigators whose “high-risk/high-reward” ideas have the potential to significantly advance the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of cancer.

Four individuals and 1 team will receive 2-year grants of $400,000. Investigators who demonstrate noteworthy progress during the first 2 years of research will receive 2 additional years of funding.

Venture capitalist Andrew S. Rachleff and his wife, Debra Rachleff, established the award to promote exceptionally creative thinkers who have an innovative idea “but lack sufficient preliminary data to obtain traditional funding.” A committee of leading cancer researchers selects the winners among applicants whose passion for curing cancer is clear.

2022 Stage 1 Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovators

• Chengcheng Jin, PhD; University of Pennsylvania: Investigating neuroimmune interaction in lung cancer
• Nora Kory, PhD; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: Targeting mitochondrial trans-porters in cancer
• Jamie B. Spangler, PhD; Johns Hopkins University: Engineered multispecific down-regulating antibodies to advance cancer immunotherapy
• Srinivas R. Viswanathan, MD, PhD; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: X marks the spot: exploring how X-chromosome alterations drive sex differences in cancer
• Ekaterina V. Vinogradova, PhD; The Rockefeller University; and Santosha A. Vardhana, MD, PhD; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: Investigating and targeting T-cell exhaustion in solid tumors

2022 Stage 2 Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovators

• Michael E. Birnbaum, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Decoding and repro-gramming tumor-infiltrating T cells by pMHC-targeted lentiviruses
• Brian B. Liau, PhD; Harvard University: Investigating allosteric mechanisms regulating DNA methyltransferase enzymes
• Michael E. Pacold, MD, PhD, NYU Langone Health: Tracing molecular oxygen in pancreatic cancer
• Elli Papaemmanuil, PhD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: Leveraging multi-modal genome profiling approaches to study disease initiation, progression, and response to therapy in TP53-mutated myeloid neoplasms