Therapeutic Development and Accelerator Grants

Pilot projects to accelerate the development of critical scientific discoveries into new approached for the diagnosis and treatment of cancers through therapeutics. 

Irving Cancer Drug Discovery Program (ICDDP)

Focus: A key capacity-building opportunity to stimulate the development, testing, and implementation of innovative scientific discoveries for the diagnosis and treatment of cancers. Projects at any stage of development, from target validation and high throughput screening to preclinical testing and IND-enabling studies, will be considered for support.

Who Should Apply: Full-time Columbia University faculty.

Applications typically open in October. One to three awards expected per cycle.

Past Awardees:

2026 Awardees:

  • Suzanne Lentzsch, MD, PhD, "Bispecific Phagocyte Engagers as Anti-Amyloid Strategy."
  • Susan Bates, MD, Ignition Award for "Novel Protein Translation Inhibitor Augments Epigenetic Therapy for Pancreatic Cancer."

2025 Awardees:

  • Benjamin Izar, MD, PhD, "Treatment of STK11-deficientnon-small cell lung cancer with anovel small molecule cancer immunotherapy."
  • Chao Lu, PhD, "Therapeutic targeting of cancer-associated DNA hypermethylation"
  • Alberto Ciccia, PhD, "Development of inhibitors of the SMARCAL1 DNA translocase"

2024 Awardee:

  • Adam Mor, MD, PhD, "Generation of anti-PAG monoclonal antibodies to treat solid malignancies" 

2023 Awardees:

  • Jordan S. Orange, MD, PhD, "Optimizing cell therapy for solid tumors by hardwiring cytotoxic cell lytic granule dispersion via genome wide and small molecule screens" 
  • Michael M. Shen, PhD,"Development of small molecule inhibitors of NSD2" 
    • Co-Investigator: Donald Landry, MD, PhD 
  • Peter D. Canoll, MD, PhD, ​​​​​“Advancing a new ferroptosis inducing drug (VP224) to clinical trial for GBM” 
    • Co-Investigators: Jeffrey N. Bruce, MD; Brent Stockwell, PhD; Peter A. Sims, PhD; Osama Al Dalahmah, MD, PhD
  • Swarnali Acharyya, PhD, "Developing the first targeted therapy against cancer cachexia" 
    • Co-Investigator: Henry M. Colecraft, PhD, professor of physiology and cellular biophysics, and pharmacology 
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