Our Impact

Solid Tumor Immunotherapy Clinical Trial Strive-02

$100,000 in new funds ($50,000 donation, plus $50,000 MacDonald match) would cover research-related costs for the first 10 patients enrolled in this innovative treatment.

Community support is moving ahead new T-cell clinical trials in our pipeline that will bring hope to children fighting many kinds of cancer. You can help us develop these studies more quickly. Donors that wish to, may direct their support to a specific T-cell trial being developed at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research.  The Solid Tumor Immunotherapy Clinical Trials fund is the top priority for Dr. Julie Park and Dr. Navin Pinto, providing resources to develop the STRIvE-02 phase I clinical trial for children with relapsed or refractory solid tumors outside of the brain.  The chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells developed for the STRIvE-02 trial will target the B7-H3 molecule which is present on the surface of many childhood solid tumors including neuroblastoma and a variety of sarcomas.

Solid Tumor Immunotherapy Research funding continues…

During our 3rd Annual Be The Hope Walk on July 17th, 2021, Valley Girls & Guys was honored to once again present Dr. Pinto with a $50,000 check that will go towards the Solid Tumor Immunotherapy Research fund. We look forward to bringing you more updates throughout the year of how these funds are directly being used and the patients your generous donations are serving through these life-changing trials.

Cancer Clinical Trials Fund

On July 16th, 2022, during our 4th annual Be The Hope walk, Valley Girls and Guys presented a check to Seattle Children’s for $29,900. This money was raised at our 2022 March Event earlier in the year, going towards the Seattle Children’s Cancer Clinical Trials Fund to further support new clinical trials in the fight against cancer. We will continue to provide updates on specific trials being funded by your generous donations as the information becomes available to share on our social media platforms.

High-Risk Leukemia Clinical Trials Fund

$120,000 – will both pay for average cost of genetic sequencing and fill the gap between federal funding and actual cost of clinical trial participation for up to 10 HRL patients.

This fund is the top priority for Dr. Todd Cooper, director of the Pediatric Leukemia/Lymphoma Program, Evans Family Endowed Chair in Pediatric Cancer, and co-director of the integrated High-Risk Leukemia Program at Seattle Children’s.  The first-of-its-kindHigh Risk-Leukemia Program greatly improves the experience of patient families, who meet with all the experts involved in their child’s care at one time.  Those in-take meetings bring together care-providers from multiple institutions including transplant teams and lab researchers who provide genetic sequencing information to ensure the best match between each child and the most promising clinical trial for his or her leukemia.  This fund supports the cost of those clinical trials, as well as the necessary genetic testing, thus helping improve outcomes for kids. Genetic testing costs on average $5,000 per patient and is rarely covered by insurance.  The gap between federal funding and the actual cost of participation for each child enrolled in a clinical trial varies but is typically at least $7,000 for high-risk leukemia (HRL) trials – note this is higher cost than the general average for all cancer trials. In 2019, our High-Risk Leukemia team anticipates treating 30 patients in Seattle and providing remote consultations for up to 40 additional patients. Donation made in honor of Cecile, Ian, Hanna, and Jack.

Children’s Circle of Care $10,000 Donation! Seattle Children’s Cancer Clinical Trials Fund
This fund is the top priority for Dr. Doug Hawkins who leads our Cancer and Blood Disorders unit. This fund helps cover the cost of studies for all types of cancer — so every child can benefit from the best therapies available. These trials impact hundreds of kids annually. In 2016, our oncology team ran 101 cancer research studies, with 899 enrollments (some patients enrolled in more than one study). Thanks to these clinical trials, and the donors who support them, survival rates as Seattle Children’s surpass the national average for nearly every type of cancer. Many of the promising cancer studies highlighted in our publications are supported by this fund. One recent example is a sarcoma study led by Dr. Hawkins and one of our new cancer team members Dr. Katie Albert. This blog post details the experience of one 5-year-old patient in the study whose tumor has disappeared entirely. The fund also supports a lot of other groundbreaking research, including Dr. Sarah Leary’s exciting Tumor Paint trial.

In 2020, Valley Girls and Guys launched a YES! Campaign as a way to do MORE to support the Cancer Clinical Trials fund during the unprecedented times that surrounded us. In January 2021, the board was excited to present Dr. Hawkins and Seattle Children’s Hospital with a $54,000 check. This money means that MORE trials can take place and more children can be helped in our fight to end ALL cancers.

We have manufactured to the vaccine in the laboratory and are now in the process of performing tests to determine whether the vaccine can undergo “scale up” manufacturing to create enough to conduct a clinical trial and we are determining whether vaccination of specific cell lines produced high enough levels of protein to be able to stimulate an immune response. These studies are part of those required to submit an “Investigational New Drug” application to the US Food and Drug Administration which is one of the first hurdles we need to pass to start a clinical trial.

TARGETING INVASIVE BREAST CANCER WITH A MULTI-ANTIGEN VACCINE

$60,000 in new funds will be used to use the master cell cassette and make the first batch of vaccines for trial.
Researchers at the UW Medicine Cancer Vaccine Institute (CVI) have identified proteins present in breast cancer stem cells that cause invasive breast cancer. The CVI has created a multi-antigen vaccine targeting five of these proteins. Now CVI researchers would like to manufacture a new lot of vaccine and test vaccine in combination with chemotherapy in women with “locally advanced breast cancer”. This is breast cancer that is too big to be taken out by surgery and women must have chemotherapy before the surgery. The Phase II clinical trial would be designed to see if vaccination can increase the number of immune cells in the tumor and whether vaccines will enhance the destruction of the tumor resulting in eradication of the tumor prior to surgery. This study will set the stage for larger trials to see if the vaccine added to chemotherapy is better than chemotherapy alone.
Update (August 2019)

We have begun working on the design of the clinical protocol, the choice of the patient population, and the types of biomarkers we will use in the study proposed. We have recently identified a more efficient method to vaccinate patients with breast cancer using a small electrical impulse to the skin at the time the vaccine is given. This method is called “electroporation” and is particularly well suited to our vaccine which uses DNA to immunize. We are planning on starting a Phase II trial of testing electroporation in patients similar to those we enrolled on our initial study. If this new method is superior in stimulating higher levels of immunity to these breast cancer proteins we will take this method forward into our therapeutic trial-the one designed to generate anti-tumor responses.

During our 3rd Annual Be The Hope walk in July 2021, a $51,485 check was presented to Dr. Nora Disis by Valley Girls and Guys and one of our amazing sponsors and her team, “Sydney’s Salon Services Legacy”. They hit the ground running and raised over fifty thousand dollars to support UW Medicine’s vaccine clinical trial in honor of Sydney and her continued fight against breast cancer.

Funding Further Research – Antigen Spreading to Fight Cancer

Dr. Nicole Kretzer, at the UW Cancer Vaccine Institute, has started a project with an ovarian cancer vaccine to determine how the vaccine activates immune system cells, like dendritic cells, to cause antigen spreading in the tumor. Antigens are proteins that the immune system recognizes and responds to. Antigen spreading is the development of immunity to numerous antigens after vaccination (even those that weren’t being targeted by the initial vaccine). The CVI reported that antigen spreading in patients after receiving a cancer vaccine is associated with better survival.  At our 2022 March event, Valley Girls and Guys presented UW Cancer Vaccine Institute and Dr. Kretzer with $75,000 in research funding to support researching antigen spreading in ovarian cancer to understand exactly how antigen spreading happens. Her work will identify which immune cells are involved in this process.

In addition to the above, Valley Girls and Guys donated an additional $10,000 to each of the below research areas at UW CVI, coming to a total of $95,000 donated to the Vaccine Institute during our 2022 March Event to support further research in HOPES of saving lives with the increasing discoveries of modern medicines and technologies.

CRYOPRESERVATION: At the CVI lab, we want to study how we cryopreserve (deep freeze viable cells for later use) white blood cells from mice used in experiments. We would like to determine how to store and revive cells to be used in immunology experiments without needing to use as many animals. This work will help us reduce the number of mice used in research and bring significant cost savings for the Institute.

STUDYING VACCINE OUTCOMES: Through our clinical trials, we obtain data about the outcomes of our vaccines. Together with our clinical trial team and our biostatistician, we would like to study whether any side effects from vaccines experienced by patients are associated with their health outcomes. This work is essential to better understand any side effects that may occur from vaccines.