An innovative call for projects to cure children with cancer

Fight Kids Cancer is an exciting new venture to cure all children and adolescents with cancer through the development of better targeted and less toxic therapies.

The Fight Kids Cancer programme is an exciting venture founded in 2019 by three European NGO’s that have joined forces to launch an opportunity to support academic research for paediatric cancers: Imagine for Margo in France; KickCancer in Belgium and Fondatioun Kriibskrank Kanner in Luxembourg.

The Fight Kids Cancer programme was joined in 2022 by the CRIS Cancer Foundation from Spain and the KiKa Foundation (Stichting Kinderkankervrij) from the Netherlands.

Our vision is to cure all children and adolescents with cancer through the development of better targeted and less toxic therapies. Fight Kids Cancer’s mission will be to catalyse and accelerate European research that results in innovative and impactful new therapies that improve the outcome for all children and adolescents with cancer.

Fight Kids Cancer impact in numbers

  • 38

    research projects (9 clinical trials and 29 translational research)

  • More than

    29

    million euros

  • 11

    disease areas funded

  • 16

    European countries supported over the past 5 years

The Fight Kids Cancer annual calls

The Fight Kids Cancer programme aims to catalyse and support pan-European innovative and relevant research initiatives in paediatric cancer to develop innovative research that improve the outcome for all children and adolescents with cancer.

Call objectives

The Fight Kids Cancer programme (hereafter “FKC”) aims to catalyse and support pan-European innovative and relevant research initiatives in paediatric cancer to develop innovative research that improves the outcome for all children and adolescents with cancer. Our calls cover the following non-exclusive objectives:

1. To realise real impact on young patients: Improve their survival rate and reduce toxicity to restore young patients to full health after treatment.

2. To advance cutting-edge science to further the knowledge of paediatric malignancies.

3. To support improved interdisciplinary knowledge, methods and collaborations for tackling the issues of today.

4. To strengthen collaboration and the development of scientific capacity across Europe. The FKC calls for projects aim towards overcoming the structural lack of research dedicated to paediatric cancers by ensuring a recurring endowment that will be granted to
the best European research projects every year. An additional ambition is to foster closer working ties between basic researchers and clinicians.

Research funded

The Fight Kids Cancer programme funds both early phase clinical trials and translational research. We support innovative interventions or approaches towards novel treatment (such as innovative drugs, artificial intelligence, imaging, radiotherapy, surgical approaches…).The two categories of projects are:

1. Early Phase Clinical Trials to evaluate innovative therapies for children and adolescents with cancer. These trials must be conducted and financed in at least 2 European countries over 3 years or less. We particularly welcome innovative clinical trial design approaches.

2. Translational research projects addressing childhood and adolescent cancers. We strongly encourage multidisciplinary or multi-institution collaborations that lead to the identification of novel targets of action, new therapies or better models of disease. We require a clear pathway to a clinical trial but we accept high-risk / high return proposals.

A robust selection process

All applications for fundings are independently reviewed by international experts. The selection process is organised in two stages:

A light application form or “Expression of interest”, reviewed by two independent reviewers based on the likelihood of (i) improving survival rate, (ii) improving quality of life during and after the treatments, (iii) improving our knowledge on cancer causes and treatment resistance and (iv) of resulting in a clinical trial.

A full proposal, reviewed by two (translational) or three (clinical) independent reviewers that are experts in the field, and two panellists based on (i) their scientific excellence, (ii) the quality and efficiency of the implementation and (iii) the impact for patients (including societal / policy relevance and approaches to stakeholder engagement).

Contact

Programme support and management is provided by the European Science Foundation, which is the intermediary with the funding organisations.

For further information about this announcement of opportunity please contact Fight Kids Cancer at ESF: fightkidscancer@esf.org

Contact form