How CURE’s Research Funding Complements Federal Grants

The gap CURE exists to fill

Only about 5% of federal cancer research funding is allocated to childhood cancers — even though cancer remains the leading cause of death by disease among U.S. children after infancy, with roughly 15,000 children and adolescents diagnosed each year (NCI, “Cancer in Children and Adolescents”). Federal agencies like the National Cancer Institute (NCI) fund a broad, rigorously vetted research portfolio, but competition for that funding is steep — NCI’s own Budget Fact Book shows how few research project grant applications are funded within a given fiscal year, meaning many promising, early-stage pediatric cancer ideas never reach the point where they’re competitive for a federal grant.

CURE exists in that gap. We don’t duplicate NIH and NCI funding — we fund the stages of research that come before it, alongside it, and immediately after it, so that promising ideas don’t stall for lack of a funding mechanism built for their stage.

Where CURE sits on the funding continuum

Pediatric cancer research moves through stages, each suited to a different kind of funder:

Early discovery  →  Translational bridge  →  Federal-scale trials  →  Clinical application  →  Survivorship research

  • Federal funders (NIH/NCI) are best positioned to fund large, well-powered studies once a concept has strong preliminary data — but that data has to come from somewhere first.
  • CURE funds the “somewhere first.” Our grants support the early-stage, high-risk work that is often too preliminary for NIH’s data requirements, and the translational work that moves a validated lab finding toward first-in-child application — work that falls between what NIH will fund and what a clinical trial requires.

Our two award types, and the specific gap each one fills

CURE offers two named research grants, each targeting a distinct point in that continuum:

Early Investigator (EI) Award

Open to beginning scientists and physician-scientists at the Instructor or Assistant Professor level. This award is designed for researchers who are not yet competitive for an NIH R01 — it funds the pilot work and preliminary data that early-career investigators need before they can successfully apply for federal funding. An EI award is often the first outside funding a young pediatric oncology researcher receives.

Translation to Clinic (T2C) Award

Open to investigators at any career stage (Assistant to Full Professor), funded up to $150,000/year in direct costs for two years ($330,000 total award). The T2C award targets the translational gap: promising, often federally funded discovery research that has established scientific evidence but has not yet advanced to a clinical trial or clinical application. Where NIH funding proves a concept works in principle, T2C funding helps move it toward a child’s bedside.

Both awards are reviewed using an NIH-style peer review process: proposals are scored by an independent Peer Review Committee of pediatric oncologists and researchers, using the same scoring approach the NIH uses, before the Board of Directors makes final funding decisions.

Supporting NCI’s national data infrastructure

Federal investment isn’t limited to individual research grants. NCI’s Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI) is building a national infrastructure to collect, standardize, and share clinical and molecular data on children and young adults with cancer — a resource meant to speed diagnosis and treatment across every institution, not just the largest ones. Private, investigator-level research that CURE funds — new datasets, biomarkers, and hypotheses generated at individual institutions — is exactly the kind of raw material that makes a national data resource like CCDI more useful over time. The two efforts reinforce each other: NCI builds the shared infrastructure, and privately funded discovery work feeds it.

Building the pipeline back toward federal funding

The relationship runs both directions. A CURE-funded pilot study can generate the preliminary data an investigator needs to compete for an NIH R01 or equivalent federal grant — meaning CURE funding often becomes the on-ramp to larger federal awards, not just a substitute for them. Over the past two decades, CURE has also funded 24 pediatric oncology fellowships at Emory University School of Medicine, training clinician-researchers who go on to run federally funded labs of their own — most past fellows are now practicing pediatric hematologist-oncologists.

The numbers

  • CURE invests more than $5.7 million annually in childhood cancer research, and $48 million over the past decade — including $18 million specifically in precision medicine.
  • In 2025, CURE awarded 13 grants totaling $5.6 million, concentrated in high-grade brain tumors, aggressive leukemias, solid tumors, and metastatic disease — diagnoses where survival after relapse can fall below 10% for some subtypes.
  • Every proposal goes through the same NIH-style scoring process used by federal reviewers, ensuring CURE-funded research meets the scientific rigor federal funders expect — which is part of what makes CURE-funded pilot data usable in later NIH applications.

 

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