From Idea to Clinical Trial: How Dr. David Loeb’s Research Is Changing Childhood Cancer Treatment
Dr. David Loeb, M.D., Ph.D., from the Montefiore Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center, has dedicated his career to finding better treatments for children with sarcoma, a type of childhood cancer. Early support from Rally Foundation helped him take the first big steps in his research journey.
In 2012, Dr. Loeb received his first Rally grant. This funding helped him study how Ewing sarcoma cancer cells use energy differently than healthy cells. Those first experiments led to important discoveries and later earned him a large grant from the V Foundation. His findings were published in Clinical Cancer Research in 2025 and are now helping launch a major clinical trial testing whether an existing metabolism-blocking drug called DFMO can prevent relapse in children with high-risk Ewing sarcoma and osteosarcoma. The trial, opening in winter 2025 at nearly 40 pediatric cancer centers across the United States, represents a tenfold return on Rally’s original investment in his early ideas.
A few years later, Dr. Loeb received another Rally grant that helped him study how the tumor’s surrounding environment influences how Ewing sarcoma spreads. His lab discovered new insights into this process and identified an FDA-approved drug that could potentially limit metastasis in mouse models.
That discovery opened new doors for future funding and collaboration. Grants from the Department of Defense and the Montefiore Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center are supporting an early clinical trial. His team is now preparing a large, multi-investigator National Institutes of Health grant for 2026 to launch a broader trial that will test whether these findings in mice could help patients, too.
These two projects are powerful examples of how Rally’s early, philanthropic investment in bold ideas can directly lead to clinical trials and real advances in how we treat, and ultimately hope to cure, childhood cancers.
This is why early-stage research funding matters.
This is the power of philanthropic seed investing.
This is Rally.