Katie Brant, of Villanova, a Notre Dame Academy and University of Pennsylvania graduate, established her own non-profit, Katie's Kids for the Cure, while enduring exhaustion and sickness from experimental chemotherapies for brain cancer. Katie's Kids has been instrumental in bridging a critical gap in funding cutting-edge research often considered to be too early stage to receive government funding. While locally based, Katie's Kids has received national recognition for the impact of the research that they support, including attribution in the Journal of Neurosurgery for making critical cancer gene identification research possible.