Hospital expanding personalized medicine center for pediatrics

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) is committing $50 million to expand its Center for Personalized Medicine to advance efforts to use the human genome to make more effective diagnoses, targeted therapies and personalized healthcare for pediatric patients.

The funds will be disbursed over the next five years and the institution will seek an additional $50 million in philanthropic funding from the community to support the translation of research outcomes in the lab into bedside care for infants, children and adolescents, according to a release.
 
“Medicine is on the verge of a new era as game-changing as the discovery of antibiotics,” says Richard D. Cordova, FACHE, the hospital's president and CEO. “With President Obama’s recent announcement of support for the Precision Medicine Initiative, I am pleased to know that our institution has the capacity to lead the development of better treatments and cures for children. As the leading pediatric academic health center in a community with the largest and most diverse pediatric patient population in the United States, we have ambitious goals and are uniquely poised to deliver on them in support of personalized medicine research and clinical care.”

“In the near future, a newborn’s genome will be sequenced at birth (or even before), permitting clinicians to plan a lifetime of personalized, preventive healthcare that focuses on preventing, rather than reacting to, illness,” explain Alexander R. Judkins, MD, executive director of the Center for Personalized Medicine at CHLA and head of the hospital’s department of pathology and laboratory medicine. “Physicians and scientists at The Saban Research Institute at CHLA are in a position to research and develop treatments that are relevant for children here and across the globe. When we look at our peers using personalized medicine for children, the area where CHLA will be investing its efforts is in taking research outcomes and innovations and translating them into improvements in bedside care—an area where we already excel. This is where the real impact for children will be.”

To date, personalized medicine has focused on adult hospitals and treatment of adults but CHLA's investment in the Center for Personalized Medicine will focus on three areas with the greatest potential to positively impact children’s health: cancer, inherited diseases and infectious diseases. CHLA has leading clinical and research programs in each of these areas, and the hospital will leverage its existing resources and expertise to use genetic testing to refine and make treatment and care more precise for each.

The Center will initially focus on pediatric cancer. The Vision Center and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at CHLA have already developed a new gene sequencing test that will identify all changes related to the retinoblastoma gene (RB1) in eye cancer patients, using leading-edge genomic sequencing technology and bioinformatics. CHLA treats one-fifth of all the retinoblastoma patients in the U.S. “This is just one example of bench-to-bedside translational research involving pediatric cancer genomics already underway at CHLA,” Judkins says. “Our expansion will provide us with the opportunity to study genomic features of all new and recurrent cancers treated at CHLA and support our Children’s Center for Cancer and Blood Diseases, led by Director Alan Wayne, MD, in discovering causes and novel therapies for pediatric cancer.”

The center plans to expand to genetic conditions such as epilepsy, autism, neurocognitive disorders, congenital heart disease and cleft palate. “We have unlocked only a fraction of the information that our genes can reveal.”