Project updates from our 2020 research grant winners

Thanks to the hard work of our community, we were able to award grants of $125,000 for two outstanding research projects in 2020

Updates from our researchers

Associate Professor Tao Liu and Dr Alla Dolnikov who are both scientists from the Children’s Cancer Institute have provided the following videos to introduce themselves to our community and explain how their projects are tracking.

Associate Professor Tao Liu

Considered the most exciting of the proposals assessed by our Scientific Advisory Board, Associate Professor Tao Liu’s project involves using an existing drug to treat a group of high-risk children with an extremely rare TERT oncogene rearrangement in their neuroblastoma, who currently have a less that 40% chance of survival.

Dr Alla Dolnikov

Dr Alla Dolnikov is researching a new way to make CAR T therapy more effective in treating neuroblastoma tumours by suppressing the MYC oncogene. Currently CAR T therapy, which is seen as a promising way of using the body’s own immune system to tackle cancer cells, has not worked on neuroblastoma tumours. But, the award-winning research looks like there could be a way of changing this.

Help find a cure

These incredible projects were made possible by the support of people just like you. Help us to continue our mission to fund research into a cure for the children’s cancer neuroblastoma so one day, all children diagnosed with this cancer get the chance to grow up free from the side effects of their treatment.