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Three exceptional young clinicians with novel approaches to fighting cancer have been named the 2025 recipients of the Damon Runyon Physician-Scientist Training Award. This award, established to help bolster the ranks of this vital cohort of cancer researchers, provides physicians who have completed clinical specialty fellowship training with the opportunity to become leaders in translational and clinical research. The awardees are selected through a highly competitive and rigorous process by a committee of leading cancer researchers who are themselves physician-scientists.
Enteroendocrine cells, which line the wall of the gut, secrete hormones that regulate glucose levels, food intake, and stomach emptying. Abnormal activity of these cells can cause gastrointestinal disorders, such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), as well as intestinal tumors.
The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation today announced the launch of the Innovative Ventures in Early-Stage Technologies (InVEST) Program. This unique initiative will automatically provide the first seed check to biotech startups founded by Damon Runyon alumni scientists. The goal of the program is to catalyze billions of dollars in commercial funding for scientific discovery while generating long-term, sustainable support for future cancer research breakthroughs.
Damon Runyon has announced a new cohort of Quantitative Biology Fellows, five exceptional early-career scientists who are bringing cutting-edge computational tools to bear on some of the most important questions in cancer biology. Whether designing new proteins or mapping DNA structure, their projects aim to shed light on these fundamental questions through large-scale data collection, mathematical modeling, and quantitative analysis.
On Saturday, April 12, 2025, an intrepid team of scientific luminaries led by biotech journalist and mountaineer Luke Timmerman embarked upon the trip of a lifetime—a hike to Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal. Over the course of ten days, they covered more than forty miles of rugged, uneven terrain, bonded over card games and cups of tea, struggled through bouts of altitude sickness, and encouraged each other every day to keep going. On the afternoon of April 23, all seventeen members of the team successfully reached Everest Base Camp (elev.
Kheewoong Baek, PhD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has been named this year’s Damon Runyon-Meghan E. Raveis Fellow. This award honors former Damon Runyon Board Member Meghan Raveis, who tragically passed in a car accident in 2023.
Translocation renal cell carcinoma (tRCC) is a type of kidney cancer that arises when a gene called TFE3 on the X chromosome fuses with another gene on either the X chromosome or an autosome, as non-sex chromosomes are called. Unlike most kidney cancers, tRCC occurs mainly in female individuals, though why this is the case has never been clear. Now, a new study from Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovator Srinivas R.
Damon Runyon scientists and industry partners gathered on Thursday, March 27, for the 2025 Accelerating Cancer Cures Symposium, hosted by Novartis in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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.