Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award

The Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award is designed to provide support for the next generation of exceptionally creative thinkers with 'high-risk/high-reward' ideas that have the potential to significantly impact our understanding of and/or approaches to the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of cancer. The Innovation Award is specifically designed to provide funding to extraordinary early career researchers who have an innovative new idea but lack sufficient preliminary data to obtain traditional funding. It is not designed to fund incremental advances. The research supported by the award must be novel, exceptionally creative and, if successful, have the strong potential for high impact in the cancer field. The Stage 1 award provides two years of funding at $200,000 per year ($400,000 total) with the opportunity for up to two additional years of funding for a select few Innovators who demonstrate the most significant progress on their innovative research (up to four years total for $800,000). Awards are made to institutions for support of the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Investigators and are approved by the Board of Directors acting upon the recommendation of the Innovation Award Committee.