September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and it’s a time to celebrate the huge strides Stanford physician-scientists have made in understanding hard-to-treat cancers.
Leading the way is Tanja Gruber, MD, PhD, Chambers Family Endowed Professor for Pediatric Cancer and director of the Bass Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Diseases at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. She was recognized as the 2026 Scientific Honoree at the American Cancer Society San Francisco Discovery Gala. The award honors an outstanding researcher whose work reflects the progress, promise, and potential of cancer research.
Dr. Gruber conducts lab research and clinical trials, and she is also a practicing pediatric oncologist. She has spent her career asking one question when it comes to her research: “How can this benefit patients?”
Her research has helped transform outcomes for infants with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, one of the hardest childhood cancers to treat—taking two-year survival rates, traditionally just 35% to 50%, and increasing them by nearly 30% in phase 1 of a clinical trial. Now the trial has entered phase 2 and is underway at 20 sites across North America.
Watch this video to learn more about Dr. Gruber and what drives her research.
Together, Dr. Gruber and her colleagues in the Bass Center are inventing gentler and more effective treatments, and bringing them to critically ill young patients through clinical trials—turning today’s best treatments into tomorrow’s cures. They’re exploring multiple pathways including immunotherapy, stem cell transplantation, and gene therapy.
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