T32 Faculty in the News: Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation awards $3.2M to innovative early-career scientists

The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has announced eight recipients of the 2025 Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, established to support high-risk, high-reward ideas with the potential to significantly impact the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of cancer. Five extraordinary early-career researchers will receive initial grants of $400,000 over two years, and each will have the opportunity to receive two additional years of funding (for a potential total of $800,000). This year, this “Stage 2” continuation support was granted to three current Innovators who demonstrated significant progress on their proposed research during the first two years of the award.

The Innovation Award is designed to provide funding to exceptionally creative thinkers with a revolutionary idea who lack sufficient preliminary data to obtain traditional funding. The awardees are selected through a highly competitive and rigorous process by a scientific committee comprised of leading cancer researchers with their own history of innovative work.

“It's important that Damon Runyon continues to have awards like this one, which funds projects that can potentially positively impact cancer patients’ lives, even when it’s just a really good idea,” says David G. Kirsch, MD, PhD, a former Innovator who developed the first handheld device capable of detecting residual cancer during surgery. “We need to have this kind of funding within the portfolio of investments we make in cancer research, and Damon Runyon is the ideal organization to make these investments because it attracts high-caliber scientists.”

This program was established thanks to the generosity of Andy and Debbie Rachleff.

Professor Meghan Morrissey is one of eight distinguished researchers to receive the award. Click here to read more about her research and the work of all other celebrated researchers.