Virginia Tech, Children’s National Hospital award $100,000 to fund collaborative cancer research pilot projects
Children’s National Hospital and Virginia Tech have awarded two $50,000 one-year pilot grants to multi-institutional teams of scientists for pediatric brain cancer research.
The inter-institutional program, which launched in December, promotes cross-disciplinary collaborations among researchers at both institutions. At Virginia Tech, the program is part of the Virginia Tech Cancer Research Alliance. Financial support for the program was provided by the offices of the Physician-in-Chief and Chief Academic Officer at Children’s National, and by Virginia Tech’s Office of the Vice President for Health Sciences and Technology.
“We were delighted to see so many innovative and competitive research proposals for our first round of pilot grants in the area of brain cancer. By forging new research collaborations with our partners at Children’s National, we hope to make major strides in addressing one of the most common and devastating groups of cancers in children,” said Michael Friedlander, Virginia Tech’s vice president for health sciences and technology, and the executive director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC. “The pilot funding will bootstrap several programs to be able to acquire ongoing sustainable funding by providing the opportunity to test novel high-impact ideas for new strategies for treating these disorders. There are simply too few good options for children in this space now and this partnership can change that for the better.”
The collaborative research initiative began through an agreement between the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and the Children’s National Research Institute. The collaborative teams formed through a series of interactive discussions among Virginia Tech’s Cancer Research Alliance faculty members from the university’s Blacksburg and Roanoke campuses, and Children’s National’s neuro-oncology researchers.
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