Damon Runyon News

March 17, 2025

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.

March 5, 2025

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.

February 12, 2025

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. 

January 29, 2025

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.

January 27, 2025

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).

December 20, 2024

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.


October 23, 2024

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.


October 23, 2024

Each year, the Damon Runyon-Jake Wetchler Award for Pediatric Innovation is given to a third-year Damon Runyon Fellow whose research has the greatest potential to impact the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of pediatric cancer. This year, the award recognizes the work of Yapeng Su, PhD, a Damon Runyon Quantitative Biology Fellow at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.


October 23, 2024

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, and nearly a third of these cancers are driven by mutations in the KRAS gene. Long considered an “undruggable” cancer target, mutant KRAS proteins are known to rewire alveolar type II progenitor (AT2) cells, which line the lung surface and are responsible for repairing lung tissue after injury.

October 12, 2024

Although many childhood cancers are now curable with chemotherapy, these lifesaving treatments often carry serious long-term side effects. Studies have shown, for example, that childhood cancer survivors are fifteen times more likely than the general population to suffer from congestive heart failure.  For patients and pediatric oncologists, the toxicity of chemotherapy drugs is tolerated only because there are no better options—in the United States, that is.