This Father’s Day, meet Dr. Vitanza, a pediatric neuro-oncologist researcher at Seattle Children’s and father whose work focuses on finding better treatments for children with brain tumors.
Throughout his career, Dr. Vitanza has dedicated himself to advancing pediatric cancer research and pursuing the breakthroughs families urgently need. As a recipient of early-career funding from Cookies for Kids’ Cancer, he understands firsthand how critical research support is to moving promising ideas forward.
From a defining moment during his training to the motivation that drives his work today, Dr. Vitanza shares why breakthroughs matter, what keeps him going and the message he hopes every supporter of pediatric cancer research hears.
As both a father and a researcher, what does a breakthrough in pediatric cancer research represent to you?
Even before becoming a father, I felt a perpetual frustration with the lack of effort locally, nationally and internationally to improve the health of children, which I think should be a guiding light for all our decisions as a society. How, for all our progress, have we done so relatively little for children with cancer? It is something that kept me up at night during my pediatric training and drove me to this career.
Whether it is improved supportive care, better access to treatment, optimizing current therapies or developing genuine breakthroughs, I think this is something we should be discussing and working on all day, every day. For many of the kids I take care of, a cure is not an option with our current therapies and that is unacceptable. Those children need genuine breakthroughs in the same way we need food and water. It is simply a necessity. To me, breakthroughs are the bare minimum we owe our patients.
What’s one moment in your career or as a dad that has stayed with you the most?
I could list a thousand moments that have stayed with me as a dad. Regardless of how hard any individual day is, I try to be grateful for how lucky I am to spend time with such a wonderful little boy.
The moment that has stayed with me professionally happened during my fellowship in hematology and oncology at NYU. Dr. Jeff Allen, one of the original leaders in pediatric neuro-oncology, was meeting with a new family and encouraged me to join him. He brought a mother and father into a room, opened their child’s MRI, pointed to a white lesion in the brain and said, “Surgery will not be an option to treat this, but we do not need tumor tissue to make the diagnosis because we know from the imaging that this is a tumor called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. I am very sorry, but this is a tumor we do not have a cure for.”
I am sure they were already petrified, but I remember watching them after they heard those two sentences and thinking I had just witnessed a moment when they became different people from who they were when they walked into that room. I remember trying very hard not to cry. Up to that point, I had trained at smaller centers and had never met a child with DIPG or their parents, so I had never been part of a conversation like this.
It would be a huge understatement to say I was overwhelmed. I felt frustration, grief and anger. Frankly, I was struggling to be present for what they were going through. Afterward, though, I thought that while I could not help that family, hopefully in the future I could help other families.
In your opinion, what makes the way Cookies for Kids’ Cancer supports pediatric cancer research effective?
Pediatric cancer research is underfunded at every level. I wish this was not necessary, but so often it is the people who have been affected who are tasked with driving the field forward. Cookies for Kids’ Cancer has funded 155 research grants totaling more than $25 million, but the benefit to the field is incalculable.
I was one of the early-career investigators the organization funded. I remember thinking, as I received the first grant supporting my independent lab, that it would allow me to pursue the work I believed was important. As a lab, you are paying for your research and the salaries of both yourself and your staff. It is not uncommon for new labs, regardless of how good their ideas are, to close within their first few years, forcing researchers to pursue jobs in other fields.
Cookies for Kids’ Cancer is willing to fund new scientists searching for cures across a range of diseases. Supporting young scientists who can propose ideas for any type of cancer is a powerful way to move the field forward.
What motivates you to keep pushing forward, even during difficult moments in research?
Children are dying, so how insignificant is any difficult research moment I could ever face? If there is one thing I am never low on, it is motivation.
If you could share one message with our supporters, what would it be?
You have no idea what your value is. All of our labs are small businesses, except we do not have a product to sell other than our ideas and hope. By believing in this organization and in children with cancer, you are supporting research that may literally otherwise never happen.
Every new finding that comes out of these grants and helps a child, or every new finding that forms the basis of another idea years down the line that helps a child, is possible because of you.
This Father’s Day, we celebrate fathers like Dr. Vitanza, whose dedication extends beyond their own families and into the pursuit of better treatments for children with cancer.
His story is a reminder that every breakthrough begins with an idea, every discovery requires support and every child deserves access to better options. Through research, determination and the generosity of supporters, we can continue moving pediatric cancer research forward.
