Helping Kids With Cancer Feel Better: How One Doctor’s Research Is Changing Lives

When kids go through cancer treatment, they often feel pain, nausea, anxiety and other tough symptoms and side effects. Lillian Sung, M.D., Ph.D., at The Hospital for Sick Children (also known as SickKids), wanted to help make that better. With early funding from Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research in 2015 and 2017, she started a project called SPARK. One part of it, called SSPedi, is a tool that lets kids tell doctors how they’re feeling during treatment.

Because of Rally Foundation’s support, Dr. Sung was able to study how asking kids regularly about symptoms like pain and anxiety could help them feel better. She showed that when doctors used SSPedi, kids had 18% better pain control. That’s a big deal!

Thanks to this early help from Rally, Dr. Sung got more funding from big research groups in the U.S. and Canada. She ran two large studies that proved checking in regularly with kids and helping them manage symptoms really works.

Now, Dr. Sung shares SPARK with other hospitals at no cost so that more kids can benefit. At SickKids, they even built SPARK into Epic, the most-used hospital record system in the world, so doctors can access it easily.

What started with one small grant is now helping thousands of kids with cancer feel better all over the world.

This is why early-stage research funding matters.

This is the power of philanthropic seed investing.

This is Rally.