NORTHWESTERN MUTUAL, through its foundation, will fund four young investigator grants for childhood cancer research. The awards support Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation’s young investigator program.
The addition of these four research projects results in eight total funded research projects this year, an $800,000 commitment. Each researcher receives a total grant of $100,000 over two-years. Four of the recipients received their initial funding last year.
The eight grant recipients are: Charalambos Kaittanis, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, for studying the effects of radiation therapy; Laura Schuettpelz, of Washington University at St. Louis, for harvesting bone marrow; Shizhen Zhu, of the Mayo Clinic, for neuroblastoma development; Cigall Kadoch, of Dana Farber Institute, for sarcoma tumor research; Jeffrey Huo, of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for studying the epigenetic origins of the retinoblastoma tumor-initiating cell; Carl Koschmann, of University of Michigan, for therapy for pediatric glioblastoma; Katherine Tarlock, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, for therapeutic strategies for leukemia; and Mireya Velasquez, of Baylor College of Medicine, for research for leukemia and lymphoma.
