The Denver chapter of Golfers Against Cancer — a national organization founded in 1997 by a group of Houston golfers who started raising money for cancer research after losing two of their golfing buddies to the disease — has funded three sets of University of Colorado Cancer Center researchers for work on projects involving CAR T-cell therapy in pediatric cancer.
The funding is considered “seed grants” — money researchers can use to develop their ideas before submitting to organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or Department of Defense for larger grants.
“What you’re funding are all the brilliant ideas that evolve from researchers at the CU Cancer Center,” Richard Schulick, MD, MBA, director of the CU Cancer Center, said at a check presentation ceremony earlier in September. “We don’t know which ones will lead to the next big thing and which ones won’t, but they all have promise, and we have to support them to get preliminary data.”
“What you do is so important,” Schulick told Golfers Against Cancer representatives at the ceremony. “The money and support are important, but the fact that you, as leaders in the community, are getting behind cancer research is really important as well. It shows people the path.”
CU Cancer Center Director Richard Schulick, MD, MBA, poses with CU Cancer Center researchers and representatives from Golfers Against Cancer at the check presentation ceremony.
Michael Verneris, MD, and Charles Shields, PhD, along with Emily Blauel, MD, will use their funds to study pediatric sarcomas and whether adding particle “backpacks” that bind to immune cells and slowly release encapsulated drugs will enhance CAR T-cell therapy and achieve targeted and sustained drug delivery within tumors.
“This grant gives us a foothold,” Verneris said. “It allows us to move our science forward, to take a risk. Our research is risky, and the NIH will not look at this without us first getting some preliminary data to say that this is actually working.”
Nicholas Foreman, MD, and Sujatha Venkataraman, PhD, are conducting research on ependymoma, the most aggressive type of brain tumor in children. They are investigating a new type of CAR-T cell called logic-gated “AND” CAR-T cells, which have been found to be safe against normal cells, while killing ependymoma cells of the PFA subtype.
“Without the small grants, we would never be able to go and get the big grants,” Venkataraman said. “And we certainly wouldn’t be able to translate them into actual therapies that impact children.”
Matthew Witkowski, PhD, and Eric Kohler, MD, PhD, will use the Golfers Against Cancer grant to study drug resistance in B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common cancer in children and the leading cause of cancer-related death in children and young adults. Many patients have leukemia that is resistant to chemotherapy, or they have a relapse within one year despite initial promising responses to immunotherapy. The cancer center investigators are looking at the role of a gene called TP53 in resistance to CAR T-cell therapy.
“The Golfers Against Cancer funding is invaluable to the growth of young labs in our department,” said Witkowski, assistant professor of pediatric hematology/oncology and bone marrow transplantation at the CU School of Medicine. “While obtaining government funding becomes increasingly challenging, it’s philanthropic organizations that buoy innovation. We couldn’t be more appreciative of this investment in our ideas as we push the science we believe in.”