How A Grant Can Become A Cure

At this time, the Pediatric Cancer Foundation no longer funds seed grants. Instead, the organization now focuses on raising money for its own research projects through its one program, The Sunshine Project.

For the first 15 years, the Pediatric Cancer Foundation focused its funding on seed grants and post doctoral fellowships. Great headway was made with these projects, but progress was slow. The Pediatric Cancer Foundation realized that the only way to speed up the process was to encourage leading doctors and scientists to work together.

How Seed Grants Work

Seed Grants fund research projects at their start and help scientific investigators to begin exploring and proving their theories. By funding these grants at that time, the Pediatric Cancer Foundation was able to help fill a significant void in pediatric oncology research. Large national and international grant institutions typically centralize the majority of their funding to research projects that are already in advanced stages of testing. With that, researchers who are beginning programs face a great difficulty in locating funds to start up their projects.

With little funding available, far too many approaches to finding a cure for pediatric cancer are not cultivated. Seed grants help researchers nourish and develop their theories, providing them with the groundwork necessary to become eligible for grants that will take them to the next level of funding and the next level of discovery. Oftentimes, these seed grant projects yield major breakthroughs in research and each project holds great potential to lead us to a cure.

Post-doctoral fellows are MD’s or PhD’s who are not yet independent investigators. In funding Post Doctoral Fellowships, the Pediatric Cancer Foundation was able to encourage more researchers to enter the field of pediatric oncology. At the time, our thoughts were that the more researchers we have working collectively towards a cure for childhood cancer, the greater our impact will be. To that end, The Sunshine Project is the next logical step in our process.

The Pediatric Cancer Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board was developed in an effort to ensure that the organization funded the most comprehensive and promising research. The Scientific Advisory Board reviewed each application and made funding and allocation recommendations to the Foundation.

As a result of funding provided by the Pediatric Cancer Foundation, the Principal Investigator at that time, Dr. Gary W. Litman of All Children’s Research Institute, utilized the findings made through the seed grant to obtain an award from the National Institute of Health (NIH), which is our country’s governmental resource for funding of biomedical research. In March 2004, the NIH awarded Dr. Litman’s Novel Innate Immune Receptors in Zebrafish project an extremely high priority ranking and award one of the highest levels of funding possible, $1.475 million of funding over six years.