Designed to bridge the gap between discovery and patient care, the CureSearch Catapult Award will fund a clinical trial of a promising CAR T-cell therapy for children and young adults with neuroblastoma.
For children facing relapsed neuroblastoma, treatment options are limited and outcomes remain devastatingly poor. Yet a promising new approach may help change that.
CureSearch for Children’s Cancer is proud to announce that Dr. Robbie Majzner at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 CureSearch Catapult Award.
This $2 million investment, co-funded with the Jeff Gordon Children’s Foundation, will support a Phase I clinical trial evaluating a next-generation CAR T-cell therapy for children and young adults with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma.
The Catapult Award is designed to help bridge one of the most challenging gaps in pediatric cancer research: moving promising discoveries from the laboratory into clinical trials where they can begin helping children. By investing at this critical stage, CureSearch helps accelerate the development of new treatments for childhood cancers that urgently need better options.
Neuroblastoma is the most common solid tumor outside the brain in children and accounts for more than 10% of childhood cancer deaths. For children with high-risk disease, survival rates remain below 50% despite decades of research. Even among survivors, therapy can leave lasting physical and emotional effects.
While CAR T-cell therapy has transformed treatment for certain blood cancers, achieving similar success in solid tumors such as neuroblastoma has proven far more difficult.
CAR T-cell therapy works by engineering a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack cancer. One of the challenges in neuroblastoma is that these cells can become exhausted over time, limiting their ability to continue fighting the disease.
Dr. Majzner and his team are working to overcome that obstacle.
Their approach targets GD2, a molecule found on the surface of neuroblastoma cells, and incorporates a novel signaling protein called ZAP70. The goal is to help CAR T cells remain active longer, resist exhaustion, and sustain their attack against cancer cells.
In preclinical studies, these redesigned CAR T cells demonstrated stronger anti-tumor activity, improved persistence, and signs of a potentially improved safety profile compared with traditional GD2-targeted CAR T-cell therapies.
Now, with support from CureSearch, that research is moving beyond the laboratory and into a clinical trial.
The Phase I study will evaluate the therapy’s safety and help researchers better understand its potential to improve outcomes for children and young adults facing one of the most difficult-to-treat forms of childhood cancer.
“Current GD2 CAR T cells only work in patients with small amounts of disease. We’ve designed a brand-new CAR architecture that breaks past limitations to success in lab models, and this trial will allow us to bring this advanced therapy to the children who need it most,” said Dr. Majzner. “The CureSearch Catapult Award is vital to our mission; it gives us the momentum to catapult this science out of the lab and directly to the forefront of patient care.”
The potential impact extends far beyond this trial alone. If successful, this approach could lead to a new treatment option for children with relapsed neuroblastoma and other GD2-expressing cancers, while also advancing the broader field of CAR T-cell therapy for pediatric and adult cancers.
“One of the greatest challenges in pediatric cancer research is ensuring that promising discoveries reach children,” said Dr. Paisley Myers, Senior Director of Research & Programs at CureSearch. “Through the Catapult Award, CureSearch helps move innovative therapies from the laboratory into clinical trials. Dr. Majzner’s work exemplifies the bold, high-potential research we were created to support, and we’re proud to help bring this promising therapy closer to children with neuroblastoma.”
By identifying and funding high-potential research at critical moments of development, CureSearch helps bring promising therapies closer to children faster. With the support of our community, we can continue investing in bold science that has the potential to change what is possible for children diagnosed with cancer.
