Three wishes, granted
(Re)searching the Web
Research rundown
Three wishes, granted
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Children's Hospital Boston investigators are beginning work
under three important research grants.
With contracts totaling nearly $10.5 million, the Division of Immunology
will lead a nationwide network to study eczema vaccinatum (EV),
a potentially life-threatening skin infection that can occur as
a side effect of smallpox immunization. Most susceptible are people
with allergy-related eczema, particularly young children. Raif
Geha, MD, Hans Oettgen, MD, PhD, and Lynda Schneider, MD, will
lead separate investigations into why eczema predisposes vaccine
recipients to EV. With smallpox now seen as a potential weapon
of bioterrorism, the goal is to make a vaccine safe enough for
widespread use. Funding comes from the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases.
The Children's Hospital Informatics Program
received $2.5 million from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention to pilot two computer-based health surveillance programs.
In the first, Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, will try to improve control
of influenza outbreaks by combining a public-health surveillance
system, which will track respiratory illnesses, with a patient-controlled
medical record system that will provide information on flu prevention.
In the second program, Aneel Advani, MD, MPH, will collaborate
with the NASA Ames Research Center in California and public health
departments in Massachusetts and Georgia to develop an automated
telephone call center, which will conduct large-scale epidemiologic
investigations during a disease outbreak.
Children's is also party
to a $12.65 million, five-year National Institutes of Health
grant that establishes a new Harvard Center for Human Cell Therapy
with the CBR Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts General
Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The center will
help develop new therapies for cancer, immune disorders and cardiac,
lung and neurologic diseases using cells from blood, bone marrow,
muscle and other body sites, including adult and embryonic stem
cells.
(Re)searching the Web
The research enterprise at Children's
Hospital Boston just got two new Web addresses. The first,
www.childrenshospital.org/research, is a comprehensive guide
to Children's research activities, and is designed for
clinical and laboratory investigators, potential recruits, prospective
business partners, benefactors, the media and interested families.
There are separate pages for the 36 departments and divisions
that do research, and for the hospital's six multidisciplinary
research programs, including the Clinical Research Program, which
provides information on Children's ongoing clinical trials.
And
for those families interested in possibly taking part in a
clinical trial, there's the Interactive Parents' Guide to Medical
Research at www.bostonchild.vitalconsent.com. Funded by the National
Institutes of Health, the site helps families understand what
clinical trials are and whether their child might benefit from
enrolling in one. It lays out what protections are provided to
patients, and details parental responsibilities, such as monitoring
a child for side effects.
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