Assistant Professors David Sheppard, PhD, and Hanna Hunter, MD, have been granted $40,000 by the Royalty Research Fund (RRF) to support a project focused on patients undergoing CAR T-Cell immunotherapy treatment at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. The team will recruit patients who are at risk for acute neurotoxicity and will evaluate neurocognitive changes and resilience after treatment. The goal is to collect data to inform future studies of prehabilitation interventions for those at highest risk for neurotoxicity.
The RRF is a competitive grant program at the University of Washington that supports faculty research using income from the university’s technology licensing. Offered twice a year since 1992, the RRF awards up to $40,000 per project, with approximately $1 million distributed each round and an average success rate of 25%. Since 1994, the RRF Scholar program has also provided one quarter of release time for faculty with full teaching loads to focus on research.