Dr. Poul Sorensen, a Professor in the UBC Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, was very recently awarded a US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant as the Vancouver Principal Investigator of a multi-institutional grant, led by Drs. John Maris of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Crystall Mackall of Stanford University.
The grant award is $1.6M USD per year for 5 years. The grant is titled, “Discovery and Development of Optimal Immunotherapeutic Strategies for Childhood Cancers”, and is in response to NIH Funding Opportunity Number: RFA-CA-17-050 “Pediatric Immunotherapy Discovery and Development Network (PI-DDN) (U54)”, and is part of the NIH Moonshot program.
The proposed Discovery and Development of Optimal Immunotherapeutic Strategies for Childhood Cancers Center is relevant to public health because these diseases remain the leading cause mortality in childhood and current standard approaches to treat pediatric cancers frequently induce unacceptable life-long morbidity. This proposal seeks to discover the fundamental mechanisms leading to high-risk childhood cancer phenotypes, including how these malignancies evolve to evade the immune system and resist modern therapies. The proposed research is highly relevant to the NIH mission as we will translate these discoveries into novel new immunotherapeutic strategies for children, adolescents and young adults with cancer, which are predicted to improve cure rates while diminishing the long-term toxicity experienced by survivors.