Brandon's Foundation was able to offer $45,000 in the form of two research grants in 2018! This is only due to your ongoing donations and support to end head and neck cancer through research of new treatments and cures. Thank you so very much! We are please to share where your donations went this year by introducing you to the awardees, and we hope you will continue to support Brandon's Foundation so other worthy projects receive funding in 2019 and beyond!

Vinita Takiar, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology and member of the University of Cincinnati Cancer Institute (UCCI) and her multidisciplinary team, including medical oncologist Trisha Wise-Draper, MD, PhD, surgeon Alice Tang, MD, and post-doctoral fellow Christina Wicker, PhDwere awarded the 2018 Brandon C. Gromada Head &Neck Cancer Foundation Research Pilot Grant of $25,000. Their project, Developing Head and Neck Patient-Derived Organoid Models for Preclinical Testing,involves collecting pilot data looking at patient-derived organoids (PDO). Growing tumors in the lab directly from patients will provide the researchers with a new way to study head and neck cancers and explore new “personalized medicine” treatment approaches. Dr. Takiar and the Foundation's grant award were recently feature in UC News.

Brandon’s Foundation (providing $20,000) joined with the Conquer Cancer Foundation, of the American Society of Clinical Oncology(ASCO), to fund a 2018 Young Investigator Award(YIA) for a head and neck cancer research project Devarati Mitra, MD, PhD, of Dana Farber Cancer Institute, was awarded this YIA for her project Radiation Therapy in Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Resistant Head and Neck Cancer. Dr. Mitra’s research seeks to understand why most patients with head and neck cancer do not respond to immunotherapy and investigate if radiation therapy can be used as a tool to help overcome treatment resistance. Ultimately, she hopes these studies will inform how radiation therapy may be best combined with anti-PD1 treatment to maximize disease response rates and improve outcomes for those with recurrent or metastatic disease. ASCO included a feature about this grant award, Brandon and the Foundation in the November 2018 issue of ASCO Connections.