Isabella Santos Foundation Awards Grant to Fund UNC Pediatric Brain Cancer Research

UNC Health leaders in rare pediatric cancer research and treatment have received a grant of $171,382 from the Charlotte-based Isabella Santos Foundation through the organization’s TORCH Initiative.

ISF’s TORCH (Transformational Outcomes for Rare Cancer Heroes) Initiative is a bold extension of ISF’s legacy, dedicated to improving the lives of young patients battling rare cancers. Leveraging ISF’s robust network and community engagement, TORCH goes beyond Charlotte, igniting meaningful change for children and families facing the unimaginable.

“This grant is specifically to test on a really complex kind of therapy,” said Andrew Satterlee, PhD, associate director of the Brain Slice Technology Platform at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and himself a brain cancer survivor. “With the tool that we are making in my lab, we can take tumors right from the operating room and take them back into our lab and keep them alive on our special platform. We can put the drug right on that living tumor.”

“Cancer research is like any long process. You can think that it’s slow, but every day things are happening. We’ve gone forward so much in the past six months, the next year with this partnership with ISF and the TORCH initiative, it’s going to take us so much farther.”

Satterlee has partnered with David Kram MD, MCR, a pediatric neuro-oncologist at UNC Children’s and associate professor of pediatric hematology-oncology.

“One of the things that we really are excited about is this unique aspect of a research and clinician partnership,” Kram said. “To find a research partner as a clinician is hard, and I know the researchers will say the same thing about finding clinicians.”

The partnership between Kram and Satterlee is giving hope to patients and families impacted by glioma and other rare pediatric cancers that are often overlooked when it comes to research funding.

“What we’re doing is trying to discover better therapies for kids with brain cancer,” Kram said. “And that hopefully will impact kids all over the world.”

“Cancer research is like any long process,” Satterlee said. “You can think that it’s slow, but every day things are happening. We’ve gone forward so much in the past six months, the next year with this partnership with ISF and the TORCH Initiative, it’s going to take us so much farther.”

“For pediatric cancer research, funding is so, so important because it’s really hard to get,” Kram said. “It’s literally not doable without organizations like ISF.”

To hear more about this unique partnership, watch the feature below.