​​Hockey Mom Foundation
The Hockey Mom Foundation is an all volunteer organization that honors Hockey Moms everywhere by raising funds to make one time foundational donations to non-profits focused on furthering cancer research, and the care of cancer patients.
Save the Date for the
Friday, September 19, 2025, Glen Oak Golf Club, East Amherst, NY
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Thanks to the generosity of our donors, friends, board, and volunteers, the HMF had the good fortune of providing grants to two cancer care/research programs at the close of 2024! Our 2025 donations total $45,000.
We granted $25,000 to Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center for their Pediatric Palliative Care Partnership with Oishei Children's Hospital Pediatric Cancer and Blood Disorder Program. This program will support pediatric patients and families with a dedicated palliative care physician and advanced practice provider, aiming for improved pain and symptom management as well as optimized care coordination between palliative care,
primary medical, and psychosocial teams
Pictured, we presented Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute a $20,000 grant. Masahiro Hitomi, MD, PhD,
and his collaborators are establishing a novel therapeutic sensitivity array using patient-derived cancer cells
to assist in treatment selection for patients with sarcoma, a rare type of tumor that develops in bone and
soft tissue. They have collected sarcoma cells to determine patient-specific anticancer drug sensitivity.
Testing various cell culture methods, the team aims to prepare a cell population that best represents
the tumor of the patient and establish quantitative measures to determine therapeutic sensitivity of
these cells. When established, this approach will provide data to reflect cancer cell susceptibility which
would minimize the chance of trial-and-error attempts, the drawback of current cancer treatment.
December 2023 grant of $25,000 for Car T-cell research at Roswell Park Cancer Institute
The Hockey Mom foundation represented the generosity of our donors by presenting a $25,000 check to Amanda Berg of the Roswell Park Alliance Foundation for a promising CAR T-cell therapy clinical trial. With therapy improvements in survival rates for patients with blood cancers, the team at Roswell Park is shifting focus to using their technology and discoveries to study CAR T-cell therapy on solid tumors like breast, lung, pediatrics, prostate and more. Renier Brentjens, MD, PhD is actively working on two clinical trials which look to improve CAR T-cell therapy. Those trials are in very early stages, but could bring about groundbreaking changes to the way cancer is treated.
In February of 2022, Hockey Mom Foundation presented a $25,000 grant
to Roswell Park Cancer Institutefor a very promising pediatric drug trial called Curaxin.
With a successful trial, the benefits could be amazing for children with pediatric cancers. The favorable safety profile of Curaxin is boosted by the unique mechanism of action and these results support strong expectations for Curaxin’s success in the pediatric oncology arena. Dr. Katerina Gurova leads the Curaxin pediatric research at Roswell and we had the pleasure of meeting her during our check presentation. She shared that, of late, children primarily receive adult chemotherapy treatments. These treatments are tough on adults, and even more painful for children. As one would expect given the enormous risks to children, pediatric trials are very difficult and expensive to administer. The National Cancer Institute’s Children’s Oncology Group (COG), the most reputable organization in the US that coordinates
international clinical trials for pediatric cancer patients, selected Curaxin for a multicenter clinical study
We celebrated Mother's Day 2021 by presenting a $10,000 grant to Roswell Park Alliance Foundation to help advance the testing of a promising vaccine called SurVax M in glioblastoma patients.
With our very first grant In 2015, the HMF helped fund phase I clinical study of a peptide vaccine called SurVax M, and the great majority of the patients who received all doses of the vaccine – all of whom had failed standard therapy – survived longer than a year. In some cases, patients are still alive today, more than 5 years after they started treatment with SurVaxM. “In a disease where few survive beyond eight months, that’s an important signal,” said Dr. Fenstermaker, vaccine pioneer.
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Roswell is now well into the first step of the phase II clinical trial, with SurVaxM undergoing testing in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma brain tumors. Now that this step has proven both successful and safe, it’s time for the critical second step in this phase, a larger randomized trial that will be available to patients at 20 other cancer centers across the country. The HMF is thrilled to grant Roswell Park with additional funds to further this next step.