Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer

Alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma is an aggressive childhood cancer, and many children with this disease carry a mutation that combines two different proteins, PAX3 and FOXO1, into one protein, PAX3-FOXO1. This creates a protein with new function, causing changes in gene expression that leads to cancer. Children with this mutation face poor outcomes. This fusion protein is highly dynamic and samples many different structures, too many to reasonably count in fact. This makes the protein hard to drug because we traditionally target stably folded regions of proteins.

Mentor Name: Leonard Zon

Choroid plexus carcinoma (CPC) is a rare, aggressive brain cancer arising from the choroid plexus (ChP), a highly complex tissue within the brain's ventricles that produces cerebrospinal fluid. CPC is most often diagnosed in young children, and the only hope for survival is usually total removal of the tumor through surgery. However, this surgery is often complicated due to large tumor size at diagnosis, tumor invasion of nearby brain tissue, and complicated networks of blood vessels in CPC that bleed significantly in the operating room.