Childhood Cancer Research

Crazy 8 Initiative

The Crazy 8 Initiative Award will fund research into innovative and rigorous approaches that directly address the most intractable issues in pediatric cancer research today. This award is designed to coalesce cross-disciplinary cores of scientists working collaboratively in order to accelerate the pace of discovering new cures. The budget for this award is between $3-5 million USD over four years.

Crazy 8 Initiative Pilot Projects

To jump start the research ideas that came out of the Crazy 8 Initiative Meeting, ALSF supported 11 pilot projects in 2019, with at least one project for each Crazy 8 area of need.

All Accelerator Programs All ALSF Funded Projects
2025
Towards LNP Vaccine Immune-Interception for Childhood Cancer Predisposition Syndromes - Uri Tabori, MD (2025)
Uri Tabori, MD
Hospital for Sick Children
2025
Newborn Screening for Early Childhood Cancer Predisposition Syndromes
Sharon Plon, MD / PhD, Donald W. (Will) Parsons, MD/PhD, Lisa Diller, MD, Philip Lupo, PhD, Richard Parad, MD, Stacey Pereira, PhD, Sarah Scollon, MS, CGC
Baylor College of Medicine
2022
Understanding and inhibiting mechanisms of metastatic spread in osteosarcoma
Alejandro Sweet-Cordero, MD
University of California San Francisco
2022
Targeting the biological underpinnings of pulmonary metastasis in osteosarcoma
Rani George, MD/PhD
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
2020
Drugging MYCN
Yael Mossé, MD, John M. Maris, MD, Dr. Ophir Shalem, Dr. Martin Eilers, Dr. Elmar Wolf, Martine F. Roussel, PhD, Seychelle Vos, PhD, William Weiss, MD/PhD, Kliment A. Verba, PhD, Gwenn Hansen, PhD
Alfred I duPont Hospital for Children, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, The Regents of the University of California San Francisco, University of California San Francisco, University of Würzburg
2020
Tracking Ewing Sarcoma Origin by Developmental and Trans-species Genomics
Heinrich Kovar, PhD
St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute
2020
Small Molecule Degraders for Targeting Transcription Factor Drivers of Childhood Cancers
Dr. Jeffery Klco, Charles Mullighan, MBBS(Hons), MSc, MD, FRACP, FRCPA
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
2020
Barcoding Pediatric Leukemia for Therapeutic Purposes
Leonard Zon, MD
Boston Children’s Hospital
2019
Platform development for target identification in high risk pediatric leukemias
Charles Mullighan, MBBS(Hons), MSc, MD, FRACP, FRCPA, Adolfo A. Ferrando, MD/PhD
Columbia University, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
2019
Harmonizing Data Sharing Efforts towards a Federated Data Model
Olena M. Vaske, PhD, David Haussler, PhD
University of California at Santa Cruz
2019
Practical, Reproducible, and Statistically-Rigorous Workflows for Single-Nucleus Analysis of Childhood Cancer Data
Stephanie C. Hicks, PhD
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
2019
Overcoming Obstacles to Drug Development in Pediatric Cancer
Crystal L. Mackall, MD
Stanford University School of Medicine
2019
Multiplex Ion Beam Imaging of Pediatric Cancers
Crystal L. Mackall, MD
Stanford University School of Medicine
2019
Targeting the Surface-ome of Embryonal Brain Tumors
Olivier Ayrault, PhD
Institut Curie
2019
Live-Cell Surface Proteomic Characterization of Atypical Teratoid Rhabdoid Tumors Using High Throughout Multi-Color Flow
Siddhartha S. Mitra, PhD
University of Colorado Denver
2019
A comprehensive public resource for fusion-negative sarcoma sequencing data
Alejandro Sweet-Cordero, MD, Richard Gorlick, MD
University of California San Francisco
2019
Targeting Fusion-driven Sarcomas
Javed Khan, MD
National Institutes of Health
2019
Dissecting Microenvironmental Interactions in Pediatric High-Grade Gliomas that Promote Tumor Growth
Mariella G. Filbin, MD/PhD
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
2019
Targeting MYCN
Yael Mossé, MD, Julie Park, MD
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Crazy 8 Initiative Grant