Twenty-four grants, $3.9 million, sixteen institutions. That is the tally from the Lymphoma Research Foundation, which announced its newest round of scientific awards on June 17, 2026. The money is meant to improve how lymphoma, the most common form of blood cancer, is diagnosed and treated.
The projects were chosen by the Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board, a panel of leading lymphoma researchers, from proposals across North America. They cover a spread of lymphoma subtypes and disciplines, among them rare T-cell lymphomas, treatments for adolescents and young adults, new cancer therapies and disease biology.
Who is on the list
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center turns up most often among the named grantees, with Alexander Boardman, Sandeep Raj and Efrat Luttwak. The Ohio State University has three as well: Shelby Sloan, Yun Choi and John Patton. Neha Akkad and Federico Mario Aletti are at MD Anderson in Texas, and Seda Tolu and Anouchka Laurent are at Columbia University.
The rest are scattered. Mengyang Di is at the University of Washington, Andrew Jallouk at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Herman Van Besien at Weill Cornell, Amaris Balitsky at McMaster University and Hunter Cochran at Washington University in St. Louis. Graham Wehmeyer works at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, Amin Aalipour at Dana-Farber, Makoto Iwasaki at Massachusetts General Hospital, Reid Shaw at the University of Chicago and Anli Zhang at UT Southwestern.
What the Foundation says
“This year’s grant class represents the rising stars in lymphoma and CLL research,” said Dr. Andrew Evens, deputy director for clinical services and chief physician officer at the Rutgers Cancer Institute, who chairs the advisory board. “The investigators that the Foundation is supporting are addressing the most urgent and important issues in the field of lymphoma today.”
Chief executive Meghan Gutierrez struck a more hopeful note. “We continue to make progress by better understanding the many subtypes of lymphoma and developing more effective therapies,” she said. “We are honored to support these researchers whose work will bring hope to patients and families affected by lymphoma.”
The Foundation bills itself as the largest nonprofit devoted only to funding lymphoma research, and it also runs education programs, outreach and patient services. In the 30 years since it began, it has committed more than $85 million to lymphoma-specific research grants.
