Doctors team up to treat diseases

To fight diseases affecting children, doctors from Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio have teamed up under the Pediatric Regional Collaborative Grant program supported by the Indiana Clinical and Transitional Sciences Institute.

The program will be used to support pediatric research to stop the progression of diseases in children.

“We developed this program to work within our institutions to leverage additional support to study and ultimately treat childhood diseases,” said Dr. James Heubi, professor and associate chair for clinical research of pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. “There has been concern that child health issues were not getting adequate attention, and this collaborative grant program was an effort to ensure that resources were directed toward child health research.”

IU Health’s Riley Hospital for Children; Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio; Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland; and the University of Kentucky Department of Pediatrics will be working under the grant.

Each organization will contribute its own funds for its institution. A maximum budget of $50,000 will be used for the research with each center contributing $10,000.

“We created the program to ensure that the study of child health at the multiple institutions would have earmarked support for this program,” Heubi said.

The benefits of this collaborative program, which was announced March 31, are solely focused on the children receiving the treatments, said Dr. Scott Denne, professor of pediatrics at the IU School of Medicine.

“Children are in general underrepresented in research, so one of the goals of this program is to encourage new areas of investigation in pediatrics,” he said. “In addition, because institutions have different areas of expertise, combining the efforts of individuals from more than one institution can often produce stronger and more innovative research.”

Denne said the program is just getting started with the opening of applications.
The Indiana CTSI pushes discovery in the lab and helps take these results and apply them to new patient treatments.

IU, Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame are members of the Indiana chapter, which is part of a 55-member national network funded by a Clinical and Transitional Science Award from the National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health.