Rally Is Proud to Award $300,000 to These Outside the Box Grant Recipients!

Breakthroughs happen — in science, in medicine and especially in childhood cancer research — with outside-the-box thinking. At Rally Foundation, we believe that bold ideas deserve a chance, and each one may be that next big breakthrough. That’s why we created the Outside the Box Grant. We want to fund innovative, early-stage research to challenge the status quo and inspire new discoveries.

Each year, the focus of this grant shifts to meet emerging needs in childhood cancer research. For 2025, we invited researchers to explore two specific areas:

• Integrative or complementary therapies that ease the physical, psychological or social burdens of cancer and its treatment.
• Nutrition and/or supplements — like probiotics — that improve quality of life during treatment by reducing side effects such as nausea, mucositis or chemo toxicity.

Previous Outside the Box Grants have focused on rhabdomyosarcoma, brain cancer, osteosarcoma, and red light therapy for treatment-induced neuropathy. This year continues that tradition of bold innovation. We can’t wait to see how these ambitious scientists and their outside-the-box thinking will bring new ideas to life, and hope to kids fighting cancer.

Meet Our 2025 Outside the Box Grant recipients:

• Boston College: Eunji Cho, Ph.D., for Dyadic Storytelling for Adolescents and Young Adults with Cancer
• St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital: Lillian Guenther, M.D., for Clonal Assessment of Osteosarcoma Metastasis: A Pilot Study
• The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia: Cassie Kline, M.D., for Understanding the Microbiome Role in Pediatric CNS Tumors
• Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: James Morrow, M.D., Ph.D., for Driving Osteosarcoma Differentiation as a Novel Therapeutic Approach