The Damon Runyon-Jake Wetchler Award for Pediatric Innovation is given annually to a third-year Damon Runyon Fellow whose research has the greatest potential to impact the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of pediatric cancer. Challice L. Bonifant, MD, PhD, a Damon Runyon-Sohn Pediatric Cancer Fellow at the University of Michigan, received this special award at the annual Fellows' Retreat. “Working with pediatric patients suffering from cancer and the toxicities of their treatments motivates me every day to do better, work harder, and find a solution,” she says.

With cancer, sometimes the cure is almost as devastating as the disease—the toxic side effects of intense chemotherapy often ravage the body and can lead to secondary cancers. To overcome the devastating consequences of harsh treatments, Dr. Bonifant is exploring how to recruit the body’s immune system to combat acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a blood cancer affecting both children and adults. Cancer can often evade the immune system, so training immune T cells to recognize and attack AML cells is a potential way to treat cancer without harming healthy tissue. The goal of this work is to find multiple AML-specific signposts on the cancer cell surface that can be targeted by the body's T cells. Based on promising results in animal models, Dr. Bonifant has filed for a provisional patent with the hope that her work will lead to a therapy for pediatric AML. Learn more about Dr. Bonifant's research:

As a physician scientist, Dr. Bonifant is driven by the desire to see breakthroughs from her lab improve patient lives. This passion for translating discoveries into treatments stems from her undergraduate research at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, working on how hydroxyurea could treat sickle cell disease. At the time, she was volunteering in the local children’s hospital and happened to serve dinner to a teenage girl who was excited about taking a new medication that held the promise for a postive outcome. The drug was hydroxyurea. That experience defined the connection between laboratory investigation and the relief of human suffering for Dr. Bonifant.

Learn more about The Jake Wetchler Foundation for Innovative Pediatric Cancer Research.