Federal Project Grant Award Summary

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Inc. received a $491,925 Project Grant from the National Cancer Institute under the Cancer Treatment Research program (CFDA 93.395) for the period of June 1, 2026 through May 31, 2028. This R21 grant funds the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning frameworks to estimate personalized symptom networks for childhood cancer survivors. The project will create interpretable AI models that identify critical symptoms and symptom interactions by incorporating diverse risk factors including cancer therapy exposure, genetic profiles, demographics, socioeconomic status, lifestyle factors, and neighborhood-level social determinants of health. The research leverages secondary data comprising 141 ordinal symptom items and information from 1,600 survivors from the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study, with the goal of identifying symptom patterns and interactions that contribute to mortality outcomes.

The deliverables from this grant will advance symptom assessment methodology for long-term childhood cancer survivors by moving beyond population-level estimates to generate individual-level symptom networks that can inform personalized survivorship care. By developing flexible machine learning approaches that accommodate high-dimensional covariates and ordinal symptom data, this research addresses a critical gap in current assessment methods and aims to translate findings into improved clinical care strategies that mitigate the persistent and co-occurring symptom burden affecting approximately half of all childhood cancer survivors.