In today's medical research community, children's needs sometimes get lost in the shuffle to find cures for more prominent diseases. At Children's Mercy Hospital, however, children are the first priority.
According to Randall L. O'Donnell, president and CEO of Children's Mercy, the hospital's "Discovering Tomorrow" research endowment was set up to address this problem by looking at the ways in which medical complications can affect children. At present, 80% of the drugs on the market have not been tested for how children will react to them.
O'Donnell says research often overlooks the needs of children. Researchers tend to think of them as "little adults," considering size as the only relevant variable when determining dosage and a medicine's effectiveness for a particular patient.
"We simply can't draw conclusions from size because this is irrelevant as to how a particular drug will affect a child," O'Donnell says. "We as adults are fully developed and basically trying to stave off dying. Children, on the other hand, are still growing and developing and will metabolize the drugs prescribed to them much differently than adults."
With this in mind, O'Donnell and his associates set up the Discovering Tomorrow research endowment in order to provide seed money for a variety of child-focused projects. Once a research project established itself, it then becomes eligible for a grant from the National Institutes of Health, a federal organization responsible for a lion's share of the research funding in the United States.
"When a project grows to the level of garnering NIH funding, it then becomes self-sufficient, which is our goal across the board," O'Donnell says. "Children's Mercy and the research fund are here to serve as a sort of incubator or start up fund to get these projects off of the ground, with the final goal being to attract enough federal or private funding to make the project self-sufficient."
Started a year-and-a-half ago, the Discovering Tomorrow research endowment has experienced much success in growing the amount of funding for child-specific research projects. In 1995, the hospital reported receiving just over $1 million in funds for research. By 1999, that number had grown to more than $5 million.
According to O'Donnell, Children's Mercy is now closing in on $10 million for the Discovering Tomorrow endowment and it looks to keep growing. Another important figure is the number of project application reviews the hospital's Institutional Review Board has had to do recently. In 1994, Children's Mercy saw just over 200 applications for review, but by 1999 that number had grown to nearly 600 - an increase that can largely be attributed to the Discovering Tomorrow endowment, according to O'Donnell.
"By increasing the amount of funding available for research, scientists and physicians are being encouraged to go forward with their ideas," O'Donnell says. "By looking at the increase in the number of applications we've gotten, it is easy to see we're moving in the right direction."
Dr. Ralph Kauffman is currently in charge of coordinating all of the hospital's research. Some of the most exciting of this research is being done in the field of Genetics. By looking at the genetic predisposition a patient may have to certain types of disease, the hospital hopes to find a way to stop complications at their root and save children's lives.
"It is often hard to explain how research at the bench
level will effect someone's life," O'Donnell says. "But
in the end the children end up being the biggest beneficiaries,
and that's what it's all about."