The Paediatric Excellence Initiative hosted by Sheffield Children’s Hospital in collaboration with NIHR Children and Young People MedTech Cooperative has recently launched, placing the transformation of children’s healthcare at its core.
Joining Sheffield Children’s are Great Ormond Street Hospital, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Their combined research models will aim to accelerate the discovery of new treatments for children with rare and complex conditions across the globe.
The project is supported by a fourth term of funding which is being awarded to NIHR Great Ormond Street Hospital Biomedical Research Centre.
The initiative’s five key themes will combine world-leading expertise from a variety of researchers and the involvement of unique patients to focus on the following areas:
- Gene stem and cellular therapies: developing new therapies for childhood cancer and immunological, blood, brain, neuromuscular, skin and metabolic conditions.
- Genomic medicine: using technology and data analysis to improve diagnosis and develop treatments.
- Accelerating novel therapies: delivering clinical trials and stem-cell based evaluation of therapies to bring in new medicines.
- Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine: the development of new surgical and laboratory techniques to replace, repair or regenerate organs or tissues.
- Applied child health informatics: using advanced data analysis to improve management of children with rare and/or complex conditions.
Professor Paul Dimitri, Clinical Director for NIHR Children and Young People MedTech Co-operative and Professor of Child Health at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Our focus will be on developing novel devices and repurposing current devices to provide new accurate data in a useable format for paediatric practice, establishing novel pathways of care through data acquisition to reduce hospital admission, and improving trust in data sharing and device technology by involving patients and families.”
