Alex’s Lemonade of Wynnewood Distributes Nearly $4 Mln in New Pediatric Cancer Grants

, the Wynnewood-based national nonprofit, has awarded almost $4 million through 40 new medical grants for 2011, all related to the organization’s goal of finding cures for childhood cancers.

The grants will go to 29 institutions and universities in 16 states across the country. And for the first time, the foundation this year is releasing grants to medical and graduate students, in addition to traditional grants to doctors and researchers at top national hospitals and research institutions.

In a statement released Friday, Alex’s Lemonade said its 2011 pediatric oncology grants are for  projects focusing on brain tumors, leukemias, medulloblastoma, neuroblastoma, atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumors and rhabdomyosarcoma, among others.

Grants were awarded in three categories: Innovation; Program Infrastructure (funding for “support personnel or critical equipment” which speed up the process of enrolling kids with cancer in clinical trials); and Young Investigator. The grants for medical school and grad students are part of the new .

Alex’s Lemonade Stand, a registered 501(c)3 charity, was founded by pre-schooler Alexandra “Alex” Scott in 2000, and continued in front of her Penn Wynne home after the family moved there so she could be treated at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). By the time she passed away at the age of eight in 2004, her stand and others like it around the country had raised more than $1 million in funding to find a cure for childhood cancer.

“We have always believed in funding the very best research available, and the best ideas out there,” said Jay Scott, Alex’s dad and executive director of the foundation, in a statement. “We have been on a mission to attract those doctors and researchers leading the way to cures, and in 2011, we are continuing to do that through ... the addition of the POST Program.”

Alex’s Lemonade also funds nursing research, and is now accepting applications for nurse researcher grants and a two-day “Nurse Researcher Workshop” in Philadelphia.

Local awardees of the grants include Michael Hogarty, MD, of CHOP (an Innovation award), and two students receiving POST grants: Marci Laudenslager, a medical student working on a neuroblastoma project at CHOP; and Yang Ding, a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania working in the leukemia/AML project area.

For more on the national grants, click here.