CRUK Childhood Cancer Therapeutic Catalyst

Funding programme to support exploratory drug discovery projects aiming to validate and de-risk targets and accelerate the translation of laboratory discoveries into novel therapeutics for childhood cancers.

Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is the UK’s leading cancer research charity and one of the main funders of cancer research across Europe. Its research strategy aims to invest £1.5 billion over five years to support research aligned with four main objectives – discover, detect, prevent and treat – to advance understanding of the fundamental biology of cancer and lead to new prevention measures, tests and treatments.

The CRUK research funding programme awards a wide range of fellowships and grants to support researchers, across all career stages, conducting clinical, pre-clinical, discovery and translational research to advance the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and potential cure, of all forms of cancer.

The CRUK Childhood Cancer Therapeutic Catalyst programme is designed to accelerate the translation of discovery research into novel therapeutics with strong indications for cancers affecting children and young people. The programme aims to support research to de-risk early therapeutic opportunities to facilitate further drug discovery activity. Proposals are invited from across all childhood cancer indications and modalities

Funded projects are a collaboration between the researcher and the drug discovery laboratories at Cancer Research Horizons, CRUK’s innovation engine, developed to support pre-clinical therapeutic discovery and development, and accelerate research translation.

Within the framework of the programme, the types of activities that can be funded include:

• Deconvolution and validation of novel targets and pathways.
• Novel therapeutic approaches to validated targets.
• Development of platforms, assays and screens to identify novel cancer therapeutics.
• Drug discovery feasibility.