CDI News: New Research Targets Kids, Flu and 'Gut'

Congenital heart disease, lung infection and resistance to antibiotics are just some of the serious health issues affecting children. Now, 11 Washington University research teams are preparing to ask – and answer – critical questions about these and other pediatric health problems with help from $3.8 million in new grants from the Children’s Discovery Institute.

In one of the funded projects, David Rudnick, MD, PhD, will study pathways that enable the liver to regenerate, with the potential to identify a group of drugs that might enhance care for a child with liver disease. Other grants will help teams led by Barbara Warner, MD, and Gautam Dantas, PhD, study the "microbiome" — bacteria in the digestive tracts of normal babies that may play a key role in health, disease, nutrition and even resistance to antibiotic drugs.

Other newly-funded Institute projects will explore congenital abnormalities of the kidneys as well as the genetic causes of heart disease and abnormal fetal growth.

“In seeking new answers to questions about pediatric disease, we need to collaborate and think in bold new ways. That’s what these latest grants represent,” said Mary Dinauer, MD, PhD, Scientific Director of the Children’s Discovery Institute, the Fred M. Saigh Distinguished Chair in Pediatric Research at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine. “Thanks to our committed and generous donors, researchers may be among the first to discover some of the sources of childhood disease and chart a path to more effective treatments.”

The Children’s Discovery Institute encourages unique, productive collaborations among scientists at Washington University School of Medicine, the university’s Danforth Campus and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Institute-funded projects constitute "discovery research" — preliminary studies that may point scientists down a path that, years in the future, could yield new treatments.

To date, awards from the Institute have resulted in significant progress in children’s health research. Awardees have leveraged their initial “seed funding” to gain additional funding resources from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other national organizations.

The Children’s Discovery Institute is a multi-disciplinary, innovation-based research partnership between St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine that has awarded nearly $23 million in scientific grants since its launch in 2006.

“The path from discovery to treatment is often long and winding,” says Dr. Dinauer, “but we can't even take the first step without the kind of research funded by the Children's Discovery Institute."

Children’s Discovery Institute Awards

February 2011

• Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, will look at potential ways to improve flu vaccines for children.
• Sun Young Ahn, MD, will study genes that may cause babies to develop congenital abnormalities of the kidneys
• Kyunghee Choi, PhD, will lead a collaboration to study how heart cells might be regenerated
• Patrick Jay, MD, PhD, will investigate some of the genetic factors that may lead to congenital heart disease
• Audrey McAlinden, PhD, will look at the genetics that affect the growth of the limbs in the embryo
• David Rudnick, MD, PhD, will study pathways that enable the liver to regenerate, with the potential to identify a group of drugs that might enhance care of a child with liver disease
• Jennifer Silva, MD, will create a registry of children who receive cardiac pacemakers, to provide a databank to help determine the most effective use of this treatment in children
• Ryan Gray, PhD, will examine the genetics of familial scoliosis (curvature of the spine), which affects 3 to 4 % of all children
• Michael Shoykhet, MD, PhD, will receive a Faculty Scholar award to help him set up a laboratory for the study of nervous-system injury in critically ill children
• Barbara Warner, MD, will expand her study of bacteria in the digestive tracts of normal babies that may play a key role in health, disease and metabolism
• Gautam Dantas, PhD, will investigate the bacteria present inside newborn babies to understand the diversity and development of antibiotic resistant genes

The Children’s Discovery Institute is a world-class center for pediatric research and innovation. The Institute funds the collaborative, multi-disciplinary work of creative scientists aimed at some of the most devastating childhood diseases and disorders. For more information about the Children’s Discovery Institute, visit ChildrensDiscovery.org.