James R. Downing, CEO of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, received the inaugural award of the American Association for Cancer Research-St. Baldrick’s Foundation for outstanding achievement in pediatric cancer research.
Downing also holds the Donald Pinkel Chair of Childhood Cancer Treatment and is the director of the Molecular Pathology Laboratory at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
The AACR-St. Baldrick’s Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement in Pediatric Cancer Research was established in 2019 to recognize major research discoveries in pediatric cancer research and to honor an individual who has significantly contributed to any area of pediatric cancer research, resulting in the fundamental improvement of the understanding and/or treatment of pediatric cancer.
The award recipient receives the opportunity to nominate junior faculty at the assistant professor level or equivalent, who are affiliated with an academic institution involved in cancer research, cancer medicine, or cancer-related sciences, to be considered to receive a one-year, $75,000 AACR-St. Baldrick’s Foundation Pediatric Cancer Research Fellowship.
Downing’s group published one of the earliest gene expression studies classifying pediatric cancer and demonstrating that subsets of acute lymphoblastic leukemia can be defined by unique gene expression profiles. These findings drove the formation of the St. Jude-Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project. This effort led to the genomic sequencing of nearly 2,000 pediatric cancer patients, resulting in the identification of genetic driver mutations not previously linked to cancer onset and progression.
