ACGT Email Newsletters

Sarcomas develop in the body’s connective and supporting tissues, but did you know that there are more than 100 subtypes of the disease?

For Sarcoma Awareness Month, we spoke with Stephen Gottschalk, MD, a longtime ACGT Research Fellow and Scientific Advisory Council Member at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, to learn about the latest advances in our understanding of these rare cancers as well as our ability to treat them, including last month’s exciting approval of a cell therapy for children with sarcoma!

Read our full interview with Dr. Gottschalk.

On June 20, Swim Across America – Fairfield County (SAA-FC) celebrated its 20th anniversary of supporting ACGT in our fight against cancer! More than 400 people participated in this year’s event in Stamford, Connecticut, including featured guest speakers Laurie Adami, a cancer survivor who overcame her follicular lymphoma with the help of an ACGT-funded CAR T-cell therapy, and Joseph Fraietta, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Fraietta is both an ACGT and SAA Research Fellow working on next generation cell and gene therapies to treat solid tumors. Impressively, SAA-FC has raised more than $755,000 so far this year, nearly double last year’s achievement, bringing their cumulative donation total to roughly $7.5 million. The ACGT team and our Research Fellows could not be more grateful for their ongoing support!

Learn more about Laurie’s story below and stay tuned for our in-depth recap of this year’s SAA-FC event in the upcoming ACGT Impact Report.

How should scientific success be measured? The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is asking that very question and wants to hear what the research community thinks.

In a recent Request for Information, NIH invited feedback to help shape a new set of datapoints and incentives that better capture how today’s biomedical science works. While the field still leans heavily on measures tied to individual researchers, such as how often someone publishes or gets cited, the agency wants to track medical research more closely with what it ultimately exists to do: improve health and extend and enrich people’s lives. Feedback is welcome across seven themes—among them reproducibility, the sharing of data and research tools, workforce training, team science, commercialization and real-world translation, basic discovery, and benefit to society—with NIH especially keen to hear innovative ideas and quantifiable metrics as well as ways to put them into practice across different fields.

Comments must be submitted through the online comment portal by August 19, 2026. Read NIH’s full announcement.

ACGT is delighted to announce that Jonathan S. Doctor, MBA, MPH, and John Neamonitis have joined ACGT’s Board of Directors, bringing decades of combined experience in healthcare operations, investment, and entrepreneurship to support our mission.

Mr. Doctor is an Executive Partner at Ambler Brook, a healthcare-focused investment firm, and brings more than 30 years of leadership across health services, practice management, and healthcare technology. Mr. Neamonitis is the founder and General Partner of Lakehouse Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm in New York City, with a career spanning finance, investment banking, and entrepreneurship.

As ACGT Chief Executive Officer and President Kevin Honeycutt noted, “the financial and operational insight they bring will be invaluable as we advance our mission and strengthen the foundation’s long-term sustainability.”

Read the full press release.

The 2026 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting brought encouraging news for patients facing some of the most difficult-to-treat cancers—and ACGT-supported scientists were part of the progress.

The biggest headline came from pancreatic cancer, where the investigational KRAS-targeting inhibitor daraxonrasib nearly doubled overall survival in previously treated patients with metastatic disease, earning a rare standing ovation during ASCO’s plenary session. Elsewhere, personalized cancer vaccines showed durable benefit in both melanoma and brain cancer; University of Pennsylvania researchers, including ACGT Scientific Advisory Council member and Research Fellow, Carl H. June, MD, presented promising dual-target CAR T-cell results in recurrent glioblastoma; and next-generation in vivo and solid tumor CAR T cell platforms continued to advance. As ACGT celebrates its 25th anniversary, these breakthroughs are a powerful reminder that today’s experimental therapies can become tomorrow’s standard of care.

Read our recap of ASCO 2026.

Every breakthrough in cancer treatment begins with an investment in research.

At ACGT, donor support helps fund innovative cell and gene therapy research at a critical stage, when promising science needs funding to move from the laboratory into clinical trials. These investments help advance new treatments and create opportunities for patients to access innovative cell and gene therapies through clinical trials that may not otherwise be available.

For Laurie Adami, a CAR T-cell clinical trial became a lifeline.

After being diagnosed with follicular lymphoma in 2006, Laurie spent more than a decade trying one treatment after another before ultimately enrolling, in 2018, in a clinical trial for CAR T-cell therapy, a one-time treatment that reprograms a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer. Within a month, Laurie learned she had no evidence of disease. Today, almost eight years later she remains cancer-free.

While participating as a swimmer at this year’s 20th Swim Across America – Fairfield County event, Laurie stood as a living testament to the life-changing power of cell and gene therapy, sharing her story and inspiring other swimmers and volunteers who are helping raise funds for the next generation of cancer breakthroughs. Every patient’s journey is unique, but true breakthroughs only become possible when scientists have the resources to test new treatments and patients have access to innovative clinical trials.

Since our founding, ACGT, with our donors’ support, has backed bold cell and gene therapy advances, providing funding to translate innovative research into clinical trials and new therapies that continue to give patients like Laurie a cancer-free future. 

The next breakthroughs need your support. Your gift today helps ensure that the most promising science reaches the patients who are counting on innovative research to bring them hope. Please make a donation today to power the next generation of life-saving cancer research.