 |
Bruce Zetter, PhD |
No matter how much time patients and families spend walking the halls of Children's Hospital Boston, it's entirely possible that they may never know that we have two huge buildings (and a lot of other space scattered throughout the campus) devoted to the conduct of research. They may never hear that we are home to the largest research enterprise based at a children's hospital in this country, or read that we have the fifth-best-funded research program of any kind of hospital in the United States.
Yet all of this is true. Our researchers work in laboratories and clinics to develop new drugs, diagnostic tests and medical devices that can lead to treatments and tests for both childhood and adult diseases. We believe that we cannot be world-class in the clinical treatment of children if we aren't also world-class in the development of the medical knowledge that leads to the development of the treatments that will be used tomorrow.
 |
John Enders, MD |
The modern age of research at Children's began in the 1940s and 50s with the work of John Enders, for whom one of our research buildings is named. Enders was one of the first in his family to not become a banker, shocking his father by going first into medicine and then into scientific research. Enders reasoned that the most significant diseases of the day were caused by viruses, but it was hard to treat or to make vaccines against them because they couldn't be grown in large numbers outside the human body. Working with colleagues Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins, he developed the first methods to grow these viruses in the laboratory. This provided enough virus to study and allowed the development of polio vaccines by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. For his contribution to viral research, Enders was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954. Since that time, the hospital has made a commitment to be a leader in pursing research that can lead to eventual new medical treatments.
Despite our status as one of the leading centers of medical research in the country, we don't measure our success in terms of how much research we conduct or how many laboratories we have; we measure it by the impact of our research on the understanding and treatment of serious diseases that affect our patients. We divide our research into three categories: basic research, which is designed to make fundamental discoveries about the nature of childhood diseases and the development of new tests and treatments for these diseases; translational research, which moves these new discoveries into the clinic for the first time and tries to find the best ways to employ them; and clinical research, in which the new tests, devices and treatments are used in large numbers of patients to see how well they work in clinical practice.
Children's is recognized as the standard bearer for research in several disciplines, including cancer research. It was here, more than 30 years ago, that Judah Folkman, MD, director of the Vascular Biology Program, did some of his earliest work in the field of tumor angiogenesis, demonstrating that tumor growth depends on the blood vessels that feed them. Today, new treatments that inhibit the growth of blood vessels are not only extending the lives of patients with cancer, they are also treating many forms of blindness, where faulty blood vessels grow into the retina of the eye. We're also one of the leading centers for the study of stem cells, and our scientists are studying ways to use these cells to treat childhood blood diseases. Treatments may be years away, but the scientific discoveries of today will enable these treatments to one day become the standard of care.
While performing research is a luxury for some hospitals, it is a necessity for us. Yet it does not come easily or cheaply; more than $100 million per year are required to conduct our basic and clinical research efforts. Most of this money comes from the federal government, specifically from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has funded the majority of health-related research in this country during the past half-century. Today, the budget of the NIH is growing more slowly than the rate of inflation, causing many scientists to cut down their research efforts, trim the size of their laboratories and give up on promising research leads. These cuts tend to most greatly affect the youngest scientists just starting out. We have developed funding sources to help them past the current crisis, but cannot guarantee their long-term scientific careers.
 |
Karp Family Research Laboratories |
So what are the alternative sources of support that will keep our pediatric research flourishing? They include pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology companies that will use these new discoveries to produce and market the treatments of the future. They include the state government, which today is moving toward passage of a bill that will allow state funds to support the researchers of Massachusetts to develop new medical innovations and build the health science economy. They include individual donors and small private foundations, often dedicated to one specific disease and looking to encourage greater research into the underpinnings of that disease.
If you have a minute, seek out and take a look at our two large research buildings. Within them are more than 1,500 scientists and support staff working on the next generation of treatments for diseases that affect young and old alike, and who are looking out for new diseases that seem insignificant today, but may be dangerous tomorrow. They feel that every experiment they do moves them, and all of us, closer to better treatments for the children that come to us. See how the work they do is not as obvious to the children and families who walk through the doors of our clinics every day, but may, ultimately, be the work that changes their worlds for the better.
|
