The Hope Foundation – Matching SWOG Members With Opportunities

The Hope Foundation for Cancer Research, SWOG’s public charity (and so much more!), regularly develops new initiatives to support the group’s emerging needs and priorities. 

The Foundation’s newest program has just started accepting applications – the VA Staff Travel Support Program, which funds travel to group meetings by SWOG members who are staff (coordinators, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) at VA medical centers.

This program is part of the Dr. Charles D. Blanke Veterans’ Access to Clinical Trials Initiative we announced at the spring group meeting plenary to honor past SWOG chair Dr. Blanke and recognize his leadership and sustained advocacy for VA medical centers and the veterans they treat.

VA staff who wish to apply for this travel support for SWOG’s fall meeting must do so by July 15th (the same deadline holds for applications to Hope’s CRA/Nurse Travel Support Program, by the way).

Another component of the Blanke VACT Initiative is also accepting applications. The VA Storefront Support Program, which provides funds for centrally coordinating the efforts of multiple VA medical centers to make it easier for them to participate in NCI-supported trials, is open for applications through October 2nd.

Several other Hope programs have recently announced awards or acceptances:

• The latest John Crowley, PhD, Award, a mentorship opportunity designed to encourage statistical excellence in clinical trials, goes to Luisa Rivero-Zambrano, MD, of the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología (INCan) in Mexico, to support her project “Beyond Binary Biomarkers: Modeling Treatment Effect Heterogeneity Across KRAS Variant Subtypes in Metastatic Colorectal Cancer.”
• Jeremy Harris, MD, of the University of California – Irvine, has been awarded a Dr. Charles A. Coltman, Jr., Fellowship to support his leadership of S2505. This phase 3 non-inferiority trial, on track to activate early this summer, will compare short-course ultra-hypofractionated radiation therapy to standard RT for patients with high-risk, resectable soft-tissue sarcoma.
• The newest SWOG/Hope Impact Award goes to Curtis Pettaway, MD, and Niki Zacharias Millward, PhD, both of MD Anderson Cancer Center. It supports their preclinical work to identify the most promising therapeutic combinations to bring forward for testing in the next round of clinical trials in advanced penile squamous cell carcinoma.
• This summer’s installment of our Virtual Grant-Writing Workshop, led by SWOG Executive Officer Dr. Katherine Crew, is getting underway. Five early career investigators preparing for upcoming grant submissions applied for the 2026 session.

The application periods for these four programs have now closed, but Hope’s Next Generation Fund program remains open for applications until September 1st. 

The Next Generation Fund invites proposals from SWOG members for projects that tackle unmet needs across the SWOG network. Dozens of programs that are now core parts of SWOG’s and/or Hope’s functioning (including several of those mentioned above) first saw life as initiatives proposed via this Hope Foundation “open call” proposal mechanism.

You can learn more about this and other Hope programs on the Foundation’s website at TheHopeFoundation.org. That website is about to get a refresh that should make it even easier to find what you seek, letting you search by program type, member role, funding amount, or application deadline. Of course, matching SWOG members with opportunities has always been a Hope specialty.