Rally Funding Helps Build a National Model for Supportive Care in Childhood Cancer

When your child is diagnosed with cancer, everything changes. Families face long hospital stays, tough treatments and overwhelming emotions. That’s where supportive care comes in and thanks to Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research, one doctor’s vision is now helping kids and families across the country. 

Katharine Brock, a palliative care doctor at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and researcher at Emory University, received early research funding from Rally Foundation from 2016-2019 and 2021-2022. As a matter of fact, Rally was the first grant she received when she came to Atlanta. 

Rally’s funding helped launch something remarkable: a new kind of care that puts children and families first, not just medically, but emotionally and mentally too. 

What is Supportive Care? 

Supportive care, also called palliative care, is about helping patients feel as well as possible during treatment. It focuses on relieving symptoms, managing stress and suffering and improving communication between doctors, kids and families. It’s about improving quality of life throughout the entire cancer journey, whether that leads into survivorship or end-of-life. 

Dr. Brock’s big idea? Make supportive care part of the cancer care team from the beginning, when the child is first diagnosed, not something added later. Rally believed in that vision. 

Rally’s Impact 

With Rally’s support, Dr. Brock and her team were able to: 

• Serve as a participating site in four major clinical trials and studies funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) focused on communication, resilience, quality of life and what constitutes high-quality care for adolescents and young adults with cancer.  
• Publish over 10 scientific papers in Pediatric Blood & Cancer, the Journal of Pain & Symptom Management, Supportive Care in Cancer and the Journal of Oncology Practice, helping share what they learned with other hospitals.
• Create a telehealth hospice transition program to help families get home, stay home and be comfortable at home.
• Inspire other prominent children’s cancer centers to create embedded pediatric palliative oncology clinics, integrating supportive care into everyday treatment.
• Support multiple medical students, residents and fellows in their own journey into pediatric cancer care.

Because of her work and leadership, Dr. Brock was recently awarded the first-ever R. Harold Harrison Chair for Pediatric Supportive Care. This is a major honor and the first time a pediatric palliative care chair has been awarded within a pediatric cancer center in the U.S.

Why it Matters 

Kids with cancer go through so much more than just chemotherapy and radiation. They experience worries, stress and pain that supportive care can ease. Thanks to Dr. Brock’s Rally-funded research, more children and families are getting the support they need, not just to survive cancer, but to thrive during it. 

This is why early-stage research funding matters.

This is the power of philanthropic seed investing.

This is Rally.