Dr. Nai-Kong V. Cheung, MD, PhD, the Enid A. Haupt Chair in Pediatric Oncology at MSK, was honored by the Advances in Neuroblastoma Research Association (ANRA) with its 2025 lifetime achievement award. An esteemed physician-scientist, Dr. Cheung leads a laboratory in Memorial Hospital Research Laboratories at MSK, which is focused on engineering antibodies and immune cells to treat both solid tumors and liquid tumors in children.
Neuroblastoma is the most common cancer in infants under one year old and it is the most common extracranial solid tumor in children. It develops in early forms of nerve cells of the sympathetic nervous system, most often beginning in the abdomen, from the adrenal glands or sympathetic nerve ganglia near the spine. Three decades ago, this high-risk disease was fatal in nearly all cases. Today, due in part to therapies and techniques pioneered at MSK by Dr. Cheung and colleagues, survival rates have significantly improved.
The ANRA award recognizes Dr. Cheung’s invention of the monoclonal antibody 3F8 and the development of a humanized version called naxitamab (hu3F8) among his other achievements. MSK licensed naxitamab to Y-mAbs Therapeutics in 2015 with the goal to increase its availability world-wide. That same year, Dr. Cheung decided to devote full time to lab-based research to pursue his life-long mission: widening the therapeutic window to maximize cures while minimizing toxicities.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted naxitamab Breakthrough Therapy Designation in 2018 and accelerated approval to DANYELZA® (naxitamab-gqgk) in combination with granulocyte- macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), a growth factor for white blood cells, for pediatric and adult patients with relapsed or refractory high-risk neuroblastoma in the bone or bone marrow in 2020. Results from a phase 2 clinical trial published in Nature Communications in March 2025 showed that naxitamab plus GM-CSF demonstrated statistically significant efficacy with a manageable safety profile.
“I hope my award inspires other researchers who tirelessly fight for children with neuroblastoma to achieve clinically meaningful results within their lifetimes,” said Dr. Cheung. “In my acceptance speech, I joked about renaming this award to ‘halftime achievement award’, because I know I could do more, and I should do more. Much work lies ahead by inventing and developing new treatment strategies to improve the outcomes for children with neuroblastoma and other pediatric cancers.”
Dr. Cheung accepted the prestigious award at the ANRA 2025 Annual Conference held in Washington, DC at the end of May 2025, where he acknowledged the support of the Band of Parents Foundation, a charitable organization that has committed more than $14 million in neuroblastoma research to MSK since 2007. His research also has received support from other MSK programs, including the Technology Development Investment Fund (TDIF) and the Center for Experimental Therapeutics.
At MSK, Dr. Cheung continues to engineer novel antibodies and new methods for delivering T cells and radioisotopes to attack cancer. Most recently, he and members of his lab invented a self-assembling and disassembling bispecific antibody platform that enables the safe and effective delivery of large doses of radioisotopes to neuroblastoma and other solid tumors, while minimizing toxicity to other tissues.
This breakthrough invention and some of the many technologies from Dr. Cheung’s lab have been licensed by MSK to Y-mAbs, an MSK spinoff, which went public in 2018. Its development pipeline includes a number of products based on MSK technologies.
Dr. Cheung is represented by Imke Ehlers-Surur, PhD, Director of Technology and Licensing in the MSK Office of Entrepreneurship and Commercialization, at ehlersi@mskcc.org.
For more on Dr. Cheung, including his public disclosures, see here: Nai-Kong V. Cheung, MD, PhD - MSK Pediatric Hematologist-Oncologist.