Through your involvement in the UC Irvine Anti-Cancer Challenge, you have made more cancer research progress possible.
This year, register to ride, run or walk to celebrate a decade of impact in the fight against cancer.
COMMUNITY SINCE 2017
As a part of the Anti-Cancer Challenge family, you are a part of this impact.
Have photos from a past Anti-Cancer Challenge? Submit them and become part of the official slideshow celebrating 10 years of participants, supporters, finish lines and breakthroughs.
IMPACT SINCE 2017

$7.7M raised by UC Irvine Anti-Cancer Challenge participants and donors.
155 promising cancer pilot studies and early phase clinical trials funded.
$60M in extramural funding awarded to UC Irvine researchers for grants that stemmed from pilot projects.
31 specific community needs addressed
11 clinical trials accruing patients
7 companies launched
View the complete list of Anti-Cancer Challenge funded projects and awardees.
Download the full research portfolio.
WHERE THE FUNDS GO

Every penny of the funds raised by UC Irvine Anti-Cancer Challenge participants are directed towards advancing innovative basic, translational and clinical cancer research that will lead to the next breakthroughs in cancer treatment at the UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
UCI Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center is a national leader in cancer research, education and treatment. Established in 1989 as Orange County’s first cancer center and designated as NCI “comprehensive” since 1994, the cancer center meets rigorous criteria aimed at providing world-class patient care and innovative research to Orange County, the second most densely populated county in California.
TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACT: SUCCESS STORIES

A novel approach to advanced stomach cancer
Determined to improve treatment options for patients with late-stage gastric cancer, UCI Health oncologists Maheswari Senthil, MD, and Farshid Dayyani, MD, PhD, have joined forces to develop a novel clinical trial. Together, they have launched STOPGAP, an innovative phase 2 clinical trial that takes a three-pronged approach to treating gastric carcinomatosis. It is supported in part by seed money from the UC Irvine Anti-Cancer Challenge.
Read the full article here.
Finding the genetic switch to stop tumor growth
“We’ve made a new chemical that’s never been made before. We show how the drug works. And we show that the drug slows cancer growth,” says UCI Health’s Dr. Anand Ganesan. “That would not be possible without grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the UC Irvine Anti-Cancer Challenge,” he says, which helped pave the way for his decade-plus research effort to identify genes that are activated in cancer and to develop ways to prevent those genes from sending signals that spur the disease.
Read the full article here.