The Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award is designed to provide support for the next generation of exceptionally creative thinkers with “high-risk/high-reward” ideas that have the potential to significantly impact our understanding of and/or approaches to the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of cancer.

The Innovation Award is specifically designed to provide funding to extraordinary early career researchers who have an innovative new idea but lack sufficient preliminary data to obtain traditional funding. It is not designed to fund incremental advances. The research supported by the award must be novel, exceptionally creative and, if successful, have the strong potential for high impact in the cancer field.

Applications will be evaluated based on the following: 

• The applicant’s capacity to conduct bold, exceptionally creative research.
• The novelty and creativity of the proposed research. Incremental research will not be funded.
• The potential of the proposed research to lead to advances that will significantly impact the prevention, diagnosis, treatment or basic understanding of cancer.
• The applicant’s lack of resources to pursue the proposed research.