The Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group (CCLG) is inviting applications for the 2025 round of the Little Princess Trust New Ideas Grants, which are available to researchers based at hospitals, academic institutions and other non-profit research institutes in the UK and Ireland for innovative, hypothesis-led research that aims to accelerate the development of treatments for children and young people’s cancers and/or minimise treatment side effects.

The grants are a maximum of £50,000 over 12 months and are intended to enable researchers to generate high-quality preliminary data, or to demonstrate the validity of a hypothesis/study, to advance innovative and novel ideas with the potential to transform the treatment of cancers affecting children and young people and improve outcomes.

The New Ideas Grant will fund projects that aim to:

• Improve survival, treatment or patient care.
• Provide patients with kinder, less toxic treatments.
• Assist in transferring research progress from the lab to a clinical setting.
• Broaden and deepen knowledge of children and young people’s cancers.

The Trust generally funds basic science (with a clear plan for translation/patient benefit), translational research and clinical research. Proposals are invited for innovative, ‘outside the box’ ideas that are genuinely novel and may be difficult to fund from mainstream sources.

Applicants may have some preliminary data that can be developed further, but this is not a pre-requisite for funding. Priority will be given to proposals with the greatest potential to secure further funding, including from the LPT in future innovation-focused funding rounds.

Applications to this funding round should be for scientific proposals that study new approaches to treatment, in particular:

• More effective treatment with fewer toxicities/on-treatment side effects.
• Approaches to treatment that may lead to a reduction in short- and long-term sequelae of treatment (studies focusing on treatment of late effects, health behaviour interventions for survivors, fertility/reproductive health and psychosocial aspects are unlikely to be considered).
• The causes of childhood or TYA cancer, where the research is likely to lead to an improvement in outcomes.
• Accurate diagnosis of childhood or TYA cancer, where the research is likely to lead to an improvement in outcomes.

Projects must also support one of more of the top ten James Lind Alliance PSP research priorities for children’s cancer.