Project “DIPG All In”
Award: $100,000 over one year with the possibility of renewal
Principal Investigators: Kathy Warren, MD, Clinical Director of Pediatric Neuro-Oncology, Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, and Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, Stanford
When clinical testing of a drug begins, there can be significant gaps in knowledge or conflicting information about its basic biological performance. Securing additional funds to fill in these gaps is often challenging for labs; however, these gaps are important factors contributing to high drug failure rates in patients.
Project “All In” for DIPG is a novel public-private partnership led by the National Cancer Institute to coordinate DIPG studies and better qualify drug candidates for clinical trials in children by facilitating more thorough evaluation.
The project’s mission is two-fold:
- Establish and maintain a major effort to coordinate DIPG studies that will more efficiently and successfully advance DIPG therapies
- Establish a critical pipeline of therapeutic trials for all stages of the DIPG disease process.
The PBTF’s Opportunity grant supports All In’s “intramural project fund” at NCI. This precedent-setting grant is specifically designed to distribute funding as project requests are received and reviewed. The fluidity in available funding will greatly reduce researchers’ grant-writing time – shifting the concern from “What grant can I get?” to “What work needs to be done?”
This partnership also enables the PBTF to sit on the project’s Oversight Committee for evaluating funding requests. Being a part of it strengthens our expertise and insight into the research landscape at the national level.
