Walton Receives Funding From Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation

AnnMarie Walton, assistant professor, recently received funding from Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation to work as a co-investigator for the grant "The My Childhood Cancer."

The My Childhood Cancer (MCC) is a program created by Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation to provide interactive resources to childhood cancer families, including a community forum and a survey series. The MCC: Survey Series is a sequence of online questionnaires that aim to identify the different ways in which childhood cancer can impact patients and their families. By collecting information through a series of anonymous surveys, answered over time by families who have experienced childhood cancer, MCC: Survey Series has the potential to inform on childhood cancer etiology, family dynamics, the physical and emotional consequences of diagnosis and treatment, and the short and long-term impacts of childhood cancer on the entire family-unit. Dr. Walton will be working on a pilot project to broaden the scope of MCC to intersect patient-reported survey data with molecular epidemiology data by engaging a subset of participants in distribution of wearable silicone bracelets for exposomics research. The goal is to generate pilot data for use in future federal grant applications, we will demonstrate the feasibility of engaging MCC participants in non-interventional epidemiology research. For silicone bracelet distribution and return, we will target 100 leukemia patient families, seeking those families willing to wear the bracelets for one week and return them to our laboratory in pre-paid envelopes that we will provide. Our primary interest is in detecting nosocomial antineoplastic drug residues among family members, including the identification of factors associated with exposure level among caretakers and siblings (e.g. changing contaminated diapers). For participating leukemia patient families, we will request medical documentation of the child’s cancer type (e.g. pathology report), as our previous experiences seeking NIH-funding to leverage web-facilitated recruitment efforts have hinged on having adequate third-party documentation of the patient’s illness. We envision the deliverables for this medium-term aim to be the development and submission of applications for extramural funding from the NIH, including obtaining funding to expand MCC initiatives and to financially support continued survey hosting and patient follow-up efforts.