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Our database of currently and previously funded projects makes it easy to learn about the research we fund. Search awards by keyword, pediatric brain tumor type, type of science, and institution.
Leading a New Era of Research
What this Means for Supporters, Researchers and Every Child
Leading a new era of research means transforming not just how the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation funds science, but what that funding makes possible for everyone who depends on it. Here’s what this shift means in practice — for the supporters who make it possible, the researchers advancing it, and every child counting on where it leads.
Your investment in PBTF goes beyond advancing individual research projects. It helps change how research works across the field, creating a more connected system where data, knowledge, and discoveries build upon one another, multiplying the potential of every dollar.
For the first time, advances in data and technology are creating an opportunity to turn the very rarity that has historically limited pediatric brain tumor research into an advantage. As one of the few disease areas with robust and comprehensive datasets, pediatric brain tumor research is uniquely positioned to capitalize on a moment when data science, technology, and artificial intelligence are rapidly converging.
Progress today depends not only on traditional science, but on bringing these capabilities together in entirely new ways, while continuing to expand and strengthen the data that fuels them. The more connected and usable that data is, the more powerful it becomes, allowing researchers to harness AI and advanced technologies to analyze information at a speed and scale never before possible, ask questions we could not previously answer, and dramatically accelerate the path to discovery. And in doing so, pediatric brain tumor research has the potential to create a model for accelerating discovery across other rare diseases.
Research into individual tumor types remains at the core of our work and is essential to advancing our understanding of each disease. What this strategy adds is the connective layer across that work, using our philanthropic influence to ensure the data and knowledge generated through each project can reach beyond any one diagnosis. This allows more tumor types to contribute to, and benefit from, what we learn, creating more equitable opportunities for progress across diagnoses, including those that have historically received less research attention and investment.
To learn how your support can help accelerate discovery, contact Alyson Levine, Chief Development Officer, at [email protected].
We believe every project we support today should accelerate what becomes possible tomorrow.
That’s why, beginning in 2026, we will be requiring every proposal seeking PBTF funding to first leverage existing, high-quality, structured data wherever possible to avoid duplicating data generation. Where new data is needed to address meaningful gaps;, funded projects will be expected to generate high-quality, structured data and contribute their data back to the broader research community. In doing so, each project becomes part of a connected research ecosystem where what is generated can be shared, built upon, and put to work beyond any one study, institution, or diagnosis.
While this will remain a guiding principle across our research portfolio, our strategic priorities will evolve each year based on where we see the greatest gaps and opportunities for progress. This allows PBTF to remain nimble, responsive, and innovative as new science and technologies emerge, and the needs of the field change.
For 2026–2027, we’re concentrating our investments across three areas:
- Precision Medicine & Diagnostics: Development and integration of diagnostic and real-time monitoring tools, multi-modal/imaging based biomarker discovery, and early detection strategies.
- Effective Therapies: Advancing targeted and molecularly matched treatments, rational combination and sequential regimens, and treatment optimization, including de-escalation strategies.
- Survivorship and Longitudinal Outcomes: Understanding and improving long-term outcomes through the study of late effects, neurocognitive functional studies, and quality of life.
Underlying all three is a shared foundation of data, infrastructure, and technology, allowing the information generated through one project to become a resource for the projects that follow.
Learn more about Research Funding Opportunities
The Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation is determined to reach the day when tumors are diagnosed earlier and less invasively, treatments can be personalized before they begin, the right therapies are identified faster, and long-term complications can be anticipated rather than simply managed.
Advances in data and technology are bringing that vision closer than ever. And now, through our new approach to research investment, we can help ensure what becomes possible reaches more children, more equitably, regardless of tumor type or where they receive care, creating a better future, for every child.
Because anything less is not an option.
Explore the progress PBTF-supported research has helped make possible.
Pediatric brain tumor patients, their families, and doctors depend on the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation to make sure progress towards a cure doesn't stop. But while the need for childhood brain cancer research grows, funding isn't keeping up. Help us close the research funding gap. Donate or start a fundraiser today.
