-Curebound, a philanthropic organization that raises and invests strategic funding for cancer research, is announcing important updates on its grant recipients. This includes $4.1M in follow-on funding recently obtained by its 2021 oncofertility Discovery Grant recipient to expand clinical trials; an additional $1.2M secured by one of its 2023 Cure Prize recipients to further support and expand clinical trials in pancreatic cancer research; and recognition for one of its 2023 Targeted Grant recipients on its new, transformational Artificial Intelligence (AI) precision-oncology platform.

“This funding allows us to accrue patients, get answers more rapidly, and engage other scientific partners”

In particular:

• Curebound 2021 Discovery Grant recipients H. Irene Su, MD, MSCE, University of California, San Diego, and Paula Aristizabal, MD, MAS, Rady Children’s Hospital, have received $4.1M in follow-on funding to expand clinical trials for their Oncofertility Care Program. The additional funding will allow the program, aimed at preserving fertility for cancer patients, to expand to 19 clinics across three Southern California health systems.
  
  “Curebound funding was critical to expanding our pilot program into an NCI-funded clinical trial, now involving 2800 adolescent and young adult cancer patients at 19 clinics across three southern California health systems. This trial will study how to improve equitable access to oncofertility care for adolescent and young adult cancer patients. UC San Diego has become the referral center for ovarian tissue preserving for young cancer patients throughout southern California. We are now additionally partnered with Kaiser Los Angeles, Kaiser San Diego, and Eisenhower Medical Center for oncofertility care,” said Su.

• 2023 Cure Prize recipients Shweta Joshi, PhD, and Andrew Lowy, MD, of UC San Diego, have received $1.2M in follow-on funding from The Lustgarten Foundation to further support their clinical trial in pancreatic cancer research and extend the study to multiple sites including University of California Los Angeles and UC San Francisco.
  
  “This funding allows us to accrue patients, get answers more rapidly, and engage other scientific partners,” said Dr. Lowy. “We've more than doubled this incredible gift we received from Curebound. Because Curebound believed in us, that belief made an additional organization say it's worth believing in, too. Curebound’s support makes it possible for us to study the effectiveness of this approach in patients and understand the science behind it. As the drug we will use is already FDA approved for other indications, if successful our study could rapidly change the standard of care for pancreatic cancer patients.”

• New AI tool from Curebound-funded Ludmil Alexandrov, PhD of UC San Diego, bypasses DNA sequencing, outperforms FDA-approved precision-oncology tests –featured in Journal of Clinical Oncology – Alexandrov, awarded a 2023 Curebound Targeted Grant for his work in next-generation sequencing to increase precision and effectiveness of therapy for prostate cancer patients, has made an enormous step forward in a new AI platform designed to save weeks and thousands of dollars from curative first-line precision-therapy workflows, for which his Curebound-funded work was foundational. The AI method in his latest work enables immediate, low-cost detection of clinically-actionable homologous-recombination deficiency from histological slides, the FDA-approved biomarker for treating aggressive ovarian, breast, prostate and pancreatic cancers. A UC San Diego spin-off, created to accelerate translation, will make precision therapy real for other genomic biomarkers and cancers worldwide.
  
  Co-senior author of the study and Curebound-funded researcher, Scott Lippman, MD, said, "This breakthrough AI technology, applied directly to routine tissue slides, will eliminate delays and health inequities that have confounded the promise of precision oncology, to allow instantaneous, accurate, and fair access to actionable genomic-biomarker detection—required for precision, targeted therapy. There is no question that this approach is the future of precision oncology, as we know it."

“Curebound invests in high-risk/high-reward studies that others might pass on but that we feel have potential to disrupt cancer research,” says Curebound CEO Anne Marbarger. “Our scientific advisory board and research partners identify the most promising research and grant submissions, focusing on the greatest return on our donors’ investments in terms of research and clinical trial advancements, for cancer patients and their families, whom we ultimately serve.”

To date, Curebound has funded 115 cancer research grants for cancer research in San Diego, a leading biopharma hub in the U.S., with the potential to spread nationally through scientific collaborations that accelerate better detection, treatment and cures for cancers.