Rady Children’s lands $2.5 million donation to advance neuro-oncology research

Rady Children’s Hospital has received a $2.5 million gift to support neuro-oncology research, with an aim of advancing treatments for young people with hard-to-cure brain and spinal cord tumors.

The donation comes from Don and Stacy Rosenberg, who lost their eight-year-old daughter, Amanda, to brain stem glioma, a type of central nervous system tumor, in 1986.

The Rosenberg Fund for Innovation and Technological Advancement in Neuro-Oncology bolsters Rady Children’s research efforts around these difficult cancers, said Dr. William Roberts, medical director of the Peckham Center for Cancer & Blood Disorders at Rady Children’s and chief of Hematology/Oncology in the UC San Diego Department of Pediatrics.

It will support work on new therapies such as triggering the body’s immune system to attack tumors; expanding the use of genomics for diagnosis and treatment; and applying technologies including artificial intelligence to help diagnose and treat brain cancer while limiting damaging side effects.

“A lot of progress has been made,” said Roberts. “The more resources we have, the more things we can pursue. So a gift like this allows us to open doors where the knowledge is there, but we need the resources to do the work. We have proven we can make therapy and survival better when we do this kind of work. This allows us to do more of it, and do it sooner.”

Rady Children’s neuro-oncology program serves more than 500 children with central nervous system tumors. It is one of the highest-volume programs in California.

“Our program itself is already a solid program,” said Stephen Jennings, executive director at Rady Children’s Hospital Foundation. “We deal with all sorts of brain cancer and brain tumors. Don and Stacy Rosenberg came to us and said, ‘What is the next thing we should be focused on?’ And it really is the novel therapies, the new treatments.”

While childhood cancers of all types have long-term survival rates of up to 85 percent, young people with tumors in the brain or spine have survival percentages that are far lower, said Roberts.

“This donation to fund the really innovative research that would be done here — it would come out of the lab and into a clinical trails here and we would be leading the way to discoveries — that is the exciting part, to be at the cutting edge of that whole process,” said Roberts.

Don Rosenberg retired in 2021 as executive vice president and general counsel at Qualcomm after 14 years with the company. Earlier in his career he held top corporate lawyer posts at IBM and Apple. He was appointed to the Rady Children’s board of trustees in 2017 and was named to the the board of hospital’s Institute for Genomic Medicine in 2020.

When Rosenberg retired, the Qualcomm Foundation earmarked $300,000 to donate to the charity of his choice. He picked the Neuro-Oncology Fund.

Along with a law practice in New York City and other work, Stacy Rosenberg, served as executive director of Friends of Karen before relocating to San Diego. The organization provides emotional, financial and advocacy support to children with life-threatening diseases, as well as their families.

The Rosenbergs view the donation as a seed fund that they hope will spark more people to contribute to this research.

“We’re interested in building awareness in San Diego of this grave illness,” said Stacy Rosenberg, referring to childhood brain tumors. “We’re hoping that our community will join us in trying to drive forward toward a cure.”