Children's Hospital Boston's first Innovation Day Feb 14, 2012
On Tuesday, Children’s Hospital Boston featured its first Innovation Day. Organized by the Hospital’s Innovation Acceleration Program, which seeks to promote grass roots innovation within the hospital, the TEDMED style conference featured talks by 17 of the Hospital’s clinicians. Our Chief Innovation Officer Naomi Fried welcomed a packed house, which included attendees from across the country. Here we’re featuring some of the technologies that were revealed on Tuesday and how they’re changing the face of pediatric medicine: Full story »
Even a small idea, given a small boost, can have a high impact. (Rick Kimpel/Flickr)
When I tell people I work at the Technology and Innovation Development Office at Children’s (TIDO), they usually think I work to commercialize patented blockbuster drug candidates. But many of the most satisfying projects I help promote are innovations that don’t involve as much risk, time and investment, yet make a big difference for patients. Commercializing these innovations can help the greater good, and is part of what propels me to work at a licensing office at a pediatric hospital.
And sometimes it doesn’t take much to help them along.
The Sonnewheel Body Mass Index Calculator and the Vidatak communications board for patients unable to speak or write are some products supported by TIDO without income being the primary goal. Another great example, which we blogged about recently, is helping make routine blood draws less stressful for kids with learning differences and their parents.
The Blood Draw Learning Kit grew out of a serendipitous meeting. Full story »
Just like today's pennies, our bodies have only a little bit of copper in them. But what we have, we need. Danielle Arsenault wants to understand how much copper is enough for children fed via an IV. (stevendepolo/Flickr)
Check the nutrition label on just about any packaged food, and you’ll see how much carbohydrate or salt, or how many calories, are lurking inside waiting for you. But that label won’t give you the whole nutritional picture. How much magnesium does your bag of chips contain? Or iodine, or copper?
These elements are all on the list of human micronutrients: nutrients that help maintain many of the critical biochemical processes within our cells. And while we only need them in very small amounts, micronutrient deficiencies can be devastating, even fatal.
Most of us get the micronutrients we need from our diet (chips aside), but for children whose digestive tracts can’t process regular food – such as those with intestinal disorders like short bowel syndrome (SBS) – getting the right amount of micronutrients is a different story. These children often often have to get all their nutrition intravenously through a process called parenteral nutrition (PN).
Since dieticians can tailor the nutrients given to a child on PN, you’d think that it would be easy to get the right amount of micronutrients, like copper, into the mix. But that isn’t necessarily so. Full story »
Improving or maintaining access to clean drinking water is the best way to prevent a cholera epidemic. Twitter could prove an excellent way to help stop one. (Julien Harneis/Flickr)
It was after the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake that mobile-friendly social media services like Twitter and Ushahidi came into their own as disaster management and relief tools. With the nation’s already unsteady infrastructure destroyed, these tools helped speed the deployment of people and supplies to where they were needed by giving relief workers on-the-ground intelligence about what was happening, what was needed and where in nearly real time.
With hindsight, Twitter and other informal data sources could also have sped up efforts to halt the spread of one of the disaster’s most feared aftermaths – cholera. Full story »
Valentine's Day is Innovation Day (image: Richard Giles/Flickr)
In a series of 17 short TED-style talks next Tuesday, February 14, clinicians and scientists from Children’s will present new products, processes and technologies to make health care safer, better and less expensive. The event, from 1-5 p.m. Eastern, is sponsored by the Innovation Acceleration Program. It’s now running a wait list, but you can also watch the live stream or track the proceedings on Twitter (#iDay) or via @science4care. Here’s a small sampling of next week’s presenters; for details, read the press release or view the full agenda.
Diagnosing lazy eye when it’s most treatable: in preschoolers
If lazy eye, or amblyopia, is caught early – ideally, before age 5 – it’s easily treated by patching the “good” eye, forcing the child to use and strengthen the weaker eye. But if it goes unnoticed, the weak, unused eye can slowly go blind, Full story »
Lorraine Sweeney in 1963, on the 25th anniversary of her historic heart operation. (Children's Hospital Boston Archives)
When the first fetal cardiac surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital Boston in 2001 – entering Jack Miller’s heart through his mother’s abdomen and opening blood flow – the world was stunned. But more than 60 years earlier, another operation was equally game-changing.
It was 1938, a time before heart-lung bypass, when ether and chloroform were only starting to be supplanted by more controllable anesthetics, when tinkering with the heart or even opening the chest were seen as dangerous and taboo.
Tinkering was what Robert E. Gross, chief surgical resident at The Children’s Hospital, liked to do. He was interested in a congenital heart condition known as patent ductus arteriosus, a passageway between the pulmonary artery and the aorta that’s supposed to close after birth — but doesn’t. Full story »
Brain tumors like the diffuse, light gray one in this MRI do a remarkably good job of hiding from the immune system. A new treatment based on gene therapy could strip their camouflage away. (Filip Em/Wikimedia Commons)
If there’s anything that tumors are good at, it’s hiding themselves. Not from things like MRIs or CT scans, mind you, but from the immune system. Since a tumor grows from what were at one time normal, healthy cells it’s still “self,” still one of the tissues that makes you you.
“Tumor cells display very subtle differences that distinguish them from healthy cells, but by and large they look the same to your immune system,” says Mark Kieran, a pediatric neuro-oncologist at the Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Center and Children’s Hospital’s Vascular Biology Program. “The question is: How can we unmask tumors so that the immune system can do its job?”
Researchers have worked for years on cancer vaccines aimed at getting the immune system to wake up to the presence of a tumor and turn on it. With a Phase 1 safety trial , Kieran and his colleagues, including Children’s neurosurgical oncologist Lily Goumnerova, are evaluating a different strategy for patients with hard-to-treat brain tumors called malignant gliomas: They’re giving the tumors a cold. Full story »
Anesthesiologists have to get by and around a lot of things in order to put a breathing tube into a surgery patient. Kai Matthes thinks that using a pair of endoscopes could make the job easier. (National Cancer Institute)
Intubating the patient is a critical step in any surgery where general anesthesia is being used. But as any anesthesiologist will tell you, intubating a child is very different from an adult, largely because there is less space available in which to maneuver the breathing (aka endotracheal) tube.
There’s also less space in which to see. To place a breathing tube properly and keep the airway open, an anesthesiologist needs to see the patient’s vocal chords and the opening of his or her windpipe. Typically, the doctor uses a laryngoscope to see into the throat, but sometimes tumors, congenital anomalies, inflammation, or other obstructions block the view.
The next tool of choice would be a fiber optic endoscope – essentially a long, thin, tubular video camera – to peer within the throat. Sometimes, however, even the fiber optic scope can’t get a full view, and on occasion the scope and tube can get in each other’s way, making the anesthesiologist’s job harder and the procedure riskier.
But here’s a thought: If one scope can’t do the trick, what about two? Full story »
Spherical nanoparticle (Fangting/Wikimedia Commons)
Recent research on Type 1 diabetes has begun focusing on prevention: Studies indicate that children start developing diabetes-related autoantibodies sometimes years before they develop clinical diabetes requiring insulin shots. The autoantibodies are an indicator of insulitis – a precursor condition in which the insulin-producing islets in the pancreas become inflamed and infiltrated with white blood cells.
In animal models, immune-suppressing drugs have been shown to blunt this attack by curbing the number of white blood cells circulating in the body. That reduces the need for insulin treatment – but at a high cost: Given systemically, the high doses needed to suppress the immune attack cause kidney toxicity, reduce the ability to fight infections, and decrease the body’s ability to respond to insulin.
That’s a tough sell for a child who doesn’t yet have symptoms of diabetes – but that’s where nanotechnology can help, say researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Children’s Hospital Boston. What if immunosuppressants could be delivered in far smaller doses, just to where they’re needed in the pancreas? Full story »
Brian Rosman holds up a tablet app he and a team of Children's and MIT Media Lab staff developed over the past two weeks during the Health and Wellness Hackathon
At 10 a.m. he’s directing two actors on set, at 10:34 a.m. he’s filling up a catheter and at 11:01 a.m. he’s gushing about the importance of pediatric avatars. Brian Rosman, a Robotic Surgery Research Fellow in the Department of Urology at Children’s Hospital Boston, has been working non-stop at the MIT Media Lab’s Health & Wellness hackathon to create a new app for post-operative care. His duties have included directing a video about the app, rounding up realistic props and explaining how the program works to judges and hackathon attendees.
Rosman and his team of coders, clinicians and industry professionals are competing against five other teams for a $10,000 prize awarded to the best open source healthcare application. Full story »
