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New fund to advance
Children's technologies
In March, Children's Hospital Boston launched the Technology Development Fund, designed to advance early-stage technologies and make them more attractive to investors and industry. The grants, to eventually total more than $1 million per year, will fund projects that traditionally aren't done in academic labs, but are necessary for product development—including large-scale laboratory and animal studies and prototype construction. An external board of venture capitalists and leaders of biotech, pharmaceutical and device companies will vet applications from research groups at Children's and act as project advisors.
IDI to become Children's 6th interdisciplinary program
In January, Children's and the Immune Disease Institute (formerly the Center for Blood Research) began an affiliation that will make IDI the hospital's eighth multidisciplinary research program. Frederick Alt, PhD, IDI's scientific director and co-chief of Children's Division of Molecular Medicine, will direct the new program, known as the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine. IDI's 19 principal investigators and 200 staff pursue four primary research areas: adhesion molecules and inflammation, autoimmune and allergic disease, genetics of immunodeficiency and cancer, and immune defenses against infectious disease and tumors.
Google.org gift to
enhance HealthMap
HealthMap has received a second grant from Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm. Launched by John Brownstein, PhD, and Clark Freifeld of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program, HealthMap crawls the Internet—including news reports, blogs and chat rooms—for information on infectious outbreaks, then filters and synthesizes the data for a bird's-eye view of global health. With the $3 million gift, HealthMap will combine its digital technology with collaborative input from a network of 40,000 health specialists, part of the International Society of Infectious Diseases' ProMED-mail surveillance system.
Technology to
save preemies'
vision licensed
Children's has entered into an exclusive license agreement with Premacure AB (Uppsala, Sweden), for the use of insulin-like growth factor (IGF-I) to prevent and treat retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), a disease in preterm infants in which blood vessels grow abnormally in the retina, sometimes causing blindness. Lois Smith, MD, PhD, of Children's Department of Ophthalmology, with long-time Swedish collaborator Ann Hellström, MD, made the key discovery that IGF-I is critical for normal development of retinal vasculature, that its level falls in premature infants after birth and that measuring IGF-I can help assess an infant's risk for ROP. Clinical studies of IGF-1 have shown early positive results.
Sponsored research on
long-acting anesthetics
Children's has signed an exclusive license and sponsored research agreement with WEX Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Vancouver, Canada) for the development of long-acting anesthetics that combine tetrodotoxin, WEX's lead compound, with various other agents. Charles Berde, MD, PhD, of Children's Department of Anesthesiology, with collaborators, has discovered that the safety, specificity and duration of pain relief of local anesthetics can be improved by combining them with sodium channel blockers like tetrodotoxin.
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Children's Translational Research Program has given out its first five-year Investigator awards, intended to support and cultivate promising faculty-scientists and help them bring their discoveries to clinical development. The three awardees, Bernhard Kuhn, MD (Department of Cardiology), Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD (Department of Neurology), and Dario Fauza, MD (Department of Surgery), will each receive funding for half of their salaries. As Junior Investigators, Kuhn and Sahin will also receive $40,000 a year in research support. Kuhn's work involves regeneratiang heart cells to treat congenital heart disease; Sahin studies nerve-cell connectivity and how it goes awry in tuberous sclerosis and other neurologic disorders; Fauza works with amniotic stem cells to repair congenital defects.
Marsha Moses, PhD, interim director of the Vascular Biology Program, was elected last fall as Children's 11th Institute of Medicine member. Moses has made substantial contributions to understanding how angiogenesis is regulated during tumor progression. Her lab has also developed non-invasive urine tests for various cancer biomarkers, a number of which are in clinical development.
Donald Ingber, MD, PhD, of the Vascular Biology Program, has been chosen as founding director of the Hansjörg Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The Harvard institute, endowed by a $125 million gift, brings together expertise in engineering, biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, robotics and medicine. Its mission is to discover and tap engineering principles used to build living things and create products that improve human health and the environment.
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