NEW YORK, NY — The Cancer Research Institute (CRI) today announced its largest-ever annual grantmaking — 93 awards totaling $37 million — as federal funding for cancer research remains uncertain. Grant applications surged this year as researchers sought alternatives to increasingly scarce federal dollars. CRI responded by creating a brand-new funding mechanism, the inaugural IGNITE Award totaling $2.7 million for early-career researchers, as well as committing $2.5 million in reserve funding and supporting 12 additional postdoctoral fellowships.
“Cancer immunotherapy has transformed cancer treatment for millions of patients, but so much still remains undiscovered,” said Alicia Zhou, PhD, CEO of the Cancer Research Institute. “Over the last year, while researchers lost federal funding and faced tough choices about shutting down labs, CRI doubled down with more grants than ever. Our job is to make sure the most talented, audacious researchers in this field have the resources to do their best work despite lingering uncertainty at the federal level.”
Roughly 9 million patients a year across over 30 cancer types are treated with immunotherapy, a more than 20-fold increase since the first checkpoint inhibitor was approved in 2011. CRI’s grants directly support researchers at every stage, from postdoctoral fellowships that launch early scientific careers to major investigator awards funding researchers at the frontier of the field.
CRI’s 2025-2026 grants support scientists at 48 institutions across 17 states and 5 countries. Taken together, the 93 awards represent a sustained bet on the next generation of cancer immunotherapy innovation and leadership.
CRI steps in as a bridge during funding cuts
A centerpiece of this year’s grant cycle is the inaugural class of CRI IGNITE Awards — nine grants totaling $2.7 million that will help early-career researchers navigate the transition from mentored postdoctoral research to independent faculty leadership. The program, which provides funding for up to five years, was modeled on the National Institutes of Health’s K99 career development grant and designed specifically to support early-career immunotherapy researchers whose federal funding has been cut or delayed.
The inaugural cycle drew 123 applications. Among the nine awardees is Simone Park, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania working under mentor E. John Wherry, PhD. A Forbes “30 Under 30” honoree with publications in Nature, Science, and Nature Immunology, Park is studying pancreatic cancer and solid tumors, working to train the immune system to keep guarding against cancer long after treatment, lowering the chance it returns.
“One of the bigger benefits of the advances in science over the past two decades is that we now think about cancer not as this inevitable death sentence, but as something that we’re all living with in one way or the other — whether it’s ourselves or through family members or friends,” said Dr. Wherry. “And that’s a very, very different way of looking at it.
Leveraging technology in cancer research
NIH research shows just 16% of oncology data is publicly available, and that number drops to 1% when checked for standards that allow other researchers to actually use it. To address this challenge, CRI launched the CRI Discovery Engine, a first-of-its-kind, AI-ready immunotherapy research database built in collaboration with 10x Genomics (NASDAQ: TXG), Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. CRI also granted three CRI Discovery Engine Pilot Phase awards totaling approximately $2 million to fund the researchers who are seeding the Discovery Engine’s foundational datasets.
In addition, CRI granted 12 Immuno-Informatics Postdoctoral Fellowships totaling $2.7 million to support scientists working at the intersection of immunology and computational biology — among them, researchers developing blood-based tests for earlier glioblastoma detection and investigating how the brain’s immune defenses can be strengthened against metastatic cancer. Five Technology Impact Awards totaling $3.3 million will further accelerate the development of technological platforms and tools advancing the field of cancer immunotherapy.
Investing in scientists at every stage
CRI’s Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowship Program — which has grown from a single program in 1971 to a global network of more than 1,600 fellows — made 40 awards totaling $9.6 million this year. Postdoctoral fellowship applications increased dramatically as researchers sought alternatives to uncertain government support. In response, CRI funded 42% more postdoctoral fellows than originally planned, ensuring stability for promising researchers and their projects.
Five Lloyd J. Old STAR Program awards — each providing nearly $1.4 million in flexible, unrestricted funding over five years — went to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Unlike traditional grants tied to specific projects, STAR awards are designed to give mid-career scientists the freedom to pursue audacious, high-risk, high-reward research wherever it leads. Launched in 2019, the program has now committed more than $46 million to 42 STARs — all active researchers who have been identified as the next leaders in the field of immunotherapy.
“Collectively, these 93 awards represent CRI’s long-term, sustained investment in the scientists powering cancer immunotherapy research,” said Zhou. “Scientific breakthroughs require grit and perseverance — not just in the moments when researchers have a promising hypothesis, but across the years it takes to test it, refine it, and turn it into something that helps patients. That’s the commitment CRI has made for more than 70 years, and will continue to make through this unprecedented moment of disruption.”
FY25-26 Awards at a Glance (93 awards totaling $37 million)
- Lloyd J. Old STAR Program: 5 awards | $6,875,000
- Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowships: 40 awards | $9,637,000
- Immuno-Informatics Postdoctoral Fellowships: 12 awards | $2,667,000
- CRI IGNITE Awards: 9 awards | $2,700,000
- Clinic and Laboratory Integration Program: 6 awards | $1,980,000
- Technology Impact Awards: 5 awards | $3,300,000
- CRI Clinical Innovator Trials: 3 awards | $3,300,000
- CRI Discovery Engine Pilot Phase: 3 awards | $2,013,000
- Impact Grants, Awards & Conferences: 10 awards | $4,644,000
