The Cancer Research Foundation is pleased to announce its 2018 Young Investigator Awardees

The Young Investigator Award is the CRF’s preeminent grant making program and represents the Cancer Research Foundation’s commitment to funding promising early-career scientists. The Young Investigator Awards are intended to address a period in a cancer researcher’s career that presents a difficult problem: most scientists cannot compile an initial data set without funding, but financial support from the majority of funders requires a proposal backed up by primary data and results. Cancer Research Foundation Young Investigators receive a total of $75,000 over two years to pursue their own independent hypotheses and create their first data sets.

This year the Cancer Research Foundation has named six scientists as Young Investigators; the projects they will pursue with this funding represent some of the most exciting fields rising in cancer science today. The projects funded this year include methods to use RNA transcription to identify cancer earlier, potential ways to allow immunotherapy to be useful for more cancers and to extend the lives of more patients and clues as to how to induce our own immune systems to better support surgeries to cure metastatic disease. We have clinicians tracking genetic mutations that lead to inherited cancer risks, and researchers who are developing new ways to sift cancer information from blood samples. Our funded scientists come from a number of different medical and scientific fields, from human genetics, to clinical oncology, to radiology and surgery. This breath of knowledge and training is a key factor in the leverage we feel the Young Investigator Awards bring to bear on the fight against cancer.

The Cancer Research Foundation was established more than 65 years ago to find new ways to treat, prevent and cure cancer. We act as “venture philanthropists,” seeking opportunities to support new researchers and novel ideas just at the time when their promising ideas can be starved for capital. With this strategy we can employ relatively small amounts of funding for cancer science in a highly leveraged way and get outsized returns on our grant “investments.” Our annual Young Investigator Awards are one major way the Cancer Research Foundation provides seed capital to aid in tomorrow’s big cancer discoveries.

Meet the 2018 Young Investigator Awardees. Click HERE.