The Kate Amato Foundation will award $100,000 to fund three groundbreaking pediatric cancer research projects during Childhood Cancer Awareness month in September.
Kate Amato, a local Jacksonville Beach girl who died in November 2016 after a long battle with cancer, is the inspiration for the Foundation. Through her illness, Kate’s parents said they discovered how underfunded pediatric cancer research is and witnessed first-hand the brutal effects of outdated, toxic treatments. To honor Kate’s life, and continue the fight for other children, the Kate Amato Foundation is dedicated to finding safer, more effective treatments for children with cancer.
“In our first year, we are funding three cutting-edge pediatric cancer research projects at some of the leading immunotherapy and cancer genomics research labs across the country,” said Dr. Lisa Amato, executive director of Kate Amato Foundation and Kate’s mother. “We chose to award the funding in September to honor Childhood Cancer Awareness month.”
These are the Foundation’s grant recipients for 2018:
• Dr. Patricia Ernst and Dr. Terry Fry at the Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Initiative at University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Colorado, whose project is entitled “Developing a pediatric B-ALL model to uncover epigenetic mechanisms of relapse from CAR-T cell immunotherapy” and focuses on developing more effective CAR-T immune therapy treatments to prevent relapse in poor-prognosis leukemia.
• Dr. Chris Man at the Cancer Genomics and Genetics Program at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Cancer Center, whose project is entitled “The Role of CXCL 10-CXCR3 AXIS in Osteosarcoma Metastasis” and seeks to develop a biomarker-guided treatment approach that will eliminate metastasis in osteosarcoma.
• Dr. Martina Roos and Dr. John Chute at The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, whose project is entitled “Novel Targeted Therapy to Eliminate Leukemic Stem Cells in Pediatric Acute Myeloid Leukemia” and seeks to develop a pioneering approach to target pediatric leukemic stem cells that could very likely lead to a new class of drugs for precision medicine in pediatric AML therapy.
“We are deeply grateful and humbled to be a recipient of the inaugural Kate Amato Foundation Research Grant,” Roos said. “This generous support will allow our laboratory to push our translational research program forward and focus developing a novel targeted therapy approach for AML, and we are hopeful that our precision medicine approach will lay the foundation for the development of new and better treatments that will eliminate disease-propagating leukemic cancer stem cells.”
One of the pediatric oncologists serving on the Scientific Advisory Board guiding the Foundation in the selection of these pioneering projects is Dr. Patrick Brown of Johns Hopkins University.
“I’m very impressed with the strength and quality of applications KAF received this year,” Brown said. “The fact that they have been able to successfully fundraise, attract high caliber research scientists and fund such strong research projects in their first year is remarkable.”
Dr. Tim Cripe of Nationwide Children’s Hospital, another KAF advisor added, “Kate’s Foundation is poised to make a significant impact on children with cancer. Even in their first year, the Foundation team was able to attract high-quality proposals and select three innovative and impactful projects for funding that will very likely lead to better outcomes for patients in the future. I’m so excited to see the impact of Kate Amato Foundation in the years ahead.”
Lisa and Jeff Amato, Kate’s parents and directors of the foundation, expressed sincere gratitude to the Jacksonville community, stating, “This community wrapped its arms around Kate and our family during her illness. Now, to see everyone rallying behind Kate’s Foundation to help build her legacy, it’s breathtaking and shows just how kind and caring the people are in our community.”
