When a child is diagnosed with cancer, the whole family faces challenges they never knew existed – but they also find love and strength they didn’t know they had. Here, parents share how they have experienced and offered love throughout their child’s cancer journey. Showing Love Through Family and Community Support A child’s cancer diagnosis sends a ripple effect through everyone who loves them …
The Hard-To-Tread Award is a grant intended to support projects that enable the prevention, early detection and effective treatment of pediatric cancers that remain hard-to-treat. While treatment success has improved for many cancers, survival rates and therapy options have not changed for some cancers, including brain tumors, sarcomas, and acute myeloid leukemia. Each award is $250,000 over a period of 24 months. Each year, CCRF …
Dr. Alpay Temiz earned a PhD in Philosophy, Biochemistry, and Molecular Genetics from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 2008. For the past 9 years, Temiz has worked at the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Cancer Center where he conducts research focused on osteosarcoma, NF1 syndrome and MPNST. Dr. Temiz worked very closely with a young man named Bryant Keller. Keller was a new …
Cancer and the therapies used to treat it can alter the delicate blend of a child’s blood proteins. As a result, children with cancer often require transfusions of blood or blood products, which are frequently in short supply because of a national donor blood shortage. “All in all, donor-derived blood products are hugely problematic,” Feser explained. “Because these products are sourced from the pooled blood of multiple volunteer donors, they are expensive, lack uniformity, require extensive pathogen screening and are not concentrated, making them especially problematic for pediatric patients.”
Cancer support groups are meetings for people with cancer and anyone touched by the disease. Even though many cancer patients receive support from friends and family members throughout their journey, joining a cancer support group can be very beneficial. The number one reason people join is to be with others who have similar cancer experiences. Types of Support Groups Some support groups focus on all …
Even before a baby is born, neuroblastoma can start to quietly creep through their nerve cells, growing into a tumor that might go undetected for months or even years. Infants and young children whose disease is classified as high-risk — where the cancer has spread and cannot be surgically removed — face some of the worst survival rates of childhood cancers. But what if a …
Even as a college student volunteering in the cancer ward of his local children’s hospital, Robert Galvin, MD, knew he wanted to become a pediatric oncologist. But it wasn’t until his pediatric residency, when his wife was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor, that the power of cancer research truly hit him. After all the standard treatments failed to stop the cancer, the young couple …
Punch Pizza has partnered with CCRF since 2009 and contributed over $252,000. These funds directly support some of the most promising minds in childhood cancer research. We want to say thank you and share progress updates on the important work of the researchers who have been supported by the Spirit of Punch Award. 2018: Dr. Branden Moriarity Branden Moriarity, PhD, University of Minnesota Since Punch Pizza funded Dr. Branden Moriarity in 2018, his lab has been working on studying …
It’s up to you to make a difference for kids fighting cancer – and in 2021, you delivered. Because of you we funded 40 new research initiatives that will make the childhood cancer experience easier for kids and families.
Here are our top 5 childhood cancer research wins of 2021.
As a cancer caregiver, you spent many hours supporting and caring for your loved one while they went through treatment. Now that your chapter of caregiving has ended and treatment is finished, you may feel uncertain about what to do next. Here are some tips that may help you during this transition time:
Brain tumors recently rose to be the most common cause of cancer-related death in kids. Those that survive can develop serious negative late-term effects including neurological and cognitive defects that can last a lifetime, heart problems and secondary cancers. Unfortunately, harsh treatments are sometimes responsible for these bleak outcomes. “Under- and overtreatment is a big problem,” Dr. Hovestadt says. “Patients can really suffer if the tumor is overtreated with chemotherapy and radiation. But, undertreating means that you give the tumor a chance to grow back, and the patient might actually die from the disease. It is really important to have good predictions of how individual patients will do.”
Meg McElroy says she started raising money for CCRF somewhat on accident. Since 2009, she’s hosted an annual holiday party to keep college friends coming together and include new friends she’s made along the way. When the party outgrew her small NYC apartment, she decided to turn the event into a party with a purpose. Leading up to the event, she sends out messages about …
Communication breakdowns between patients, parents, doctors, nurses and other medical professionals could result in unnecessary stress and anxiety, or even decisions that could lead to physical harm. Communication is simply vital to positive childhood cancer outcomes. Until now, no one has developed tools to measure the many aspects of communication in childhood cancer. Dr. Sisk is developing these measures, which will be the first of their kind.
When childhood cancer survivor Ted Sibley finished his cancer treatment as a teenager, he received a t-shirt that said, “Finish Line.” He was proud to have reached the end of a long and difficult period of treatment – but his journey didn’t end there. Ted faced late-effects from his cancer treatment, and often didn’t know where to go to get specialized survivorship care.
In early 2021, CCRF launched the Dream Further campaign to raise $2 million for much-needed survivorship research and care coordination. In November 2021, with the help of a passionate community of supporters, the Dream Further campaign reached its ambitious goal.
The research questions started to percolate for pediatric oncologist Aman Wadhwa, MD, MSPH, as he made his rounds of the pediatric oncology unit at Children’s of Alabama. “One of the things I really noticed in my first year was there was wide variation in who gets side effects from cancer treatment and how severe,” he said. “I could have patients with the same diagnosis, and …
Shannon Conneely, MD, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Texas Children’s Hospital and researcher at Baylor College of Medicine, envisions cancer treatment like a maze with multiple exits. As chemotherapy drugs chase down the cancer cells, the craftiest of cells manage to find a back door out. Sometimes cancer cells temporarily stop dividing and grow “quiet” during treatment — only to return with a vengeance later. Conneely’s goal: …
On Wednesday, October 13, longtime members of the Children’s Cancer Research Fund community gathered to celebrate the dedication of the Katie Hageboeck Children’s Cancer Research Fund Clinic. The newly named clinic at M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital honors the memory of 13-year-old Katie Hageboeck of Wayzata, Minnesota who requested that her savings for a new 10-speed bike be used to help kids with cancer. The Pediatric Specialty Care Journey Clinic at the Masonic Children’s Hospital, which provides world-class care to children and families facing childhood cancer, will now be called the Katie Hageboeck Children’s Cancer Research Fund Clinic.
For decades, the question of Ewing sarcoma’s genetic beginnings has stumped scientists, leaving potential therapeutic targets undiscovered.
But together, Drs. Spector and Webber are creating human tumor models from the ground up and utilizing millions of pieces of readily available data to uncover how Ewing sarcoma develops. Using data from different genomic populations, they are also analyzing Ewing sarcoma driver genes or genes that cause the cancer to grow.
