Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute announced today it has been selected as a winner of the 2026 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant : Children’s Health Innovation Award , a grant opportunity designed to accelerate innovation to improve children’s health outcomes with the use of advanced cloud services. By focusing on children’s health, AWS seeks to bring more attention to a wide variety of causes and care organizations who are dedicated to helping children live longer, healthier lives, through the strategic use of cloud technology. The grant will provide $100,000 in funding and $100,000 in AWS Promotional Credits to support a project led by Lukas Chavez, PhD , to develop an AI-powered system to help clinicians analyze complex data from children with cancer and identify personalized treatment options more quickly.
Chavez is an associate professor in the Cancer Genome and Epigenetics Program and a member of the NCI-Designated Cancer Center and Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Sanford Burnham Prebys. He was named a recipient in the Children’s Health Innovation Award category, which recognizes highly innovative, mission-critical projects accelerating children’s health innovation using advanced cloud services. Chavez will receive a combination of funding and AWS computing credits, along with implementation support from technical specialists. Proposals were considered based on several criteria, including the innovative and unique nature of the project, impact on mission-critical goals and clearly defined outcomes and milestones.
“This year’s AWS Children’s Health Innovation Award recipients are doing extraordinary work to improve the lives of children, from the everyday moments to the life-changing ones,” said Rick Buettner, Global Director of Nonprofits at AWS. “Whether it’s using cloud technology to improve bus routes for special needs students or leveraging AI to answer pediatric health questions without subjecting minors to lengthy clinical studies, these organizations are reimagining what’s possible for children. At AWS, we’re honored to support these nonprofits whose work is creating lasting, meaningful change.”
Chavez and his team plan to develop a system called Leitstern, German for a star that provides orientation. The system will bring together molecular, clinical and functional data from individual patients and connect it with information from scientific literature, drug databases and clinical trial registries. Specialized AI agents will analyze the different types of data and generate evidence-based treatment hypotheses for clinicians to review. Patient data will be de-identified, and the system is being designed so that its recommendations can be traced back to their underlying sources.
Working with graduate student Christopher Brown, Chavez has established measurable goals for evaluating the system. They will compare its recommendations with decisions previously made by molecular tumor boards, evaluate the reproducibility of its results and measure how quickly it can produce reports, with a goal of completing analyses in less than 24 hours. The team also aims for 100% traceability of the system’s predictions back to their supporting evidence. Eventually, the researchers plan to test the system prospectively by analyzing new cases before they are reviewed by a tumor board and comparing its findings with the board’s recommendations.
“Children with cancer can generate an enormous amount of complex clinical, molecular and functional data, and our goal is to bring that information together in a way that helps clinicians identify potential treatment options more quickly,” said Chavez. “For children with aggressive cancers, time is critical, and reducing delays in identifying treatment options can make a meaningful difference. With Leitstern, we want to use AI to help make sense of that complexity while ensuring that every recommendation can be traced back to the evidence that supports it.”
Since the launch of the Imagine Grant program in 2018, AWS has awarded more than $21 million in unrestricted funding, AWS cloud computing credits, and technical expertise to more than 170 nonprofit organizations. Learn more about past recipients and how nonprofits use AWS to advance their missions around the world at the AWS for nonprofits hub.
For more information on the AWS Imagine Grant, visit the Imagine Grant website .
About Sanford Burnham Prebys
Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute is an independent not-for-profit biomedical research institute dedicated to understanding human biology and disease and advancing discoveries that profoundly impact human health. Today, our research spans six centers, including our NCI-designated Cancer Center, with expertise in cardiovascular, neurologic and metabolic diseases, data science and artificial intelligence and therapeutic discovery.