News

New Discoveries January 29, 2025

“Outside influence”: How extrachromosomal DNA fuels cancer

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. Cancer cells store genes in circular pieces of DNA, known as extrachromosomal DNA or ecDNA, that defy the laws of genetics.

Honors and Awards January 27, 2025

Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation awards $3.2M to innovative early-career scientists

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).

New Discoveries December 23, 2024

Unlocking the mystery of cancer metastasis

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.

Event December 17, 2024

2025 Timmerman Traverse

The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation is thrilled to continue our partnership with the Timmerman Traverse, an adventurous initiative that brings leaders and investors in biotech together to scale extraordinary heights.

New Discoveries October 30, 2024

Cancer research that shoots for the stars

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.

New Discoveries October 29, 2024

A new approach to targeted therapy

In cancer treatment, “targeted therapies” refer to drugs that identify and attack specific proteins in cancer cells that help them survive and grow, while leaving normal cells alone. Due to their specificity, targeted therapies tend to be less toxic than chemotherapy or radiation therapies. Often, they take the form of small molecule inhibitors, which bind to the cancer-promoting proteins and disable them. Unfortunately, however, small molecule inhibitors only work for a subset of cancers.

New Discoveries October 28, 2024

Revisiting a safer alternative to toxic chemotherapies

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.

Honors and Awards October 23, 2024

Yapeng Su, PhD, receives 2024 Damon Runyon-Jake Wetchler Award

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.

New Discoveries September 6, 2024

What T cell cancers can teach us about T cell therapy

Adoptive T cell therapies, in which a patient’s own immune cells are genetically engineered to target their cancer cells, have been remarkably effective in treating certain blood cancers. Unfortunately, this success has not translated to solid tumors, where T cells face unique challenges in the tumor environment that limit their persistence and function.

New Discoveries September 4, 2024

New evidence for aspirin use to lower colorectal cancer risk

Few scientific studies meet with more controversy than those that suggest a substance may cause or prevent cancer. As a leading epidemiologist of colorectal cancer, former Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Andrew T. Chan, MD, MPH, is no stranger to this rollercoaster.

Damon Runyon News