‘Real big deal for Kansas City’: Sneak peek inside Children’s Mercy research tower
Children’s Mercy’s gleaming new Research Institute on Hospital Hill won’t open until early 2021, but the hospital offered a sneak peek this week at what its executive director called “a real big deal for Kansas City.”
Bringing in a large research component takes Children’s Mercy to another level,” said Dr. Tom Curran, the institute’s chief scientific officer.
“It also ensures that the discoveries made here that benefit our children will also be spread across the world and benefit children everywhere. One child treated and cured at Children’s Mercy will amplify a thousandfold across the world.”
The nine-story, 375,000-square foot building will be home to teams collaborating from many arenas — science, medicine, academia and philanthropy. Staff members began moving in this week.
“This building will host both the labs and the information technology desks for the people that conduct a lot of that research,” said Curran, who came from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 2016 to lead Children’s Mercy’s research efforts.
“But it’s really a nexus, a meeting point for the clinic, the labs, the patients, the families, all individuals involved in the Children’s Mercy mission come together on behalf of children.
“The research that is conducted in this building is what we call translational research. We translate a scientific idea or discovery into new medicines, treatments and diagnostics for children.”
The flagship initiative is the Genomic Answers for Kids program, housed in “state-of-the-art facilities to do what we call single-cell genomics and apply this to children’s disease,” Curran said. “We are one of the first organizations, indeed anywhere in the world, to be doing this.”
The hospital broke ground on the tower in January 2018 to compete with facilities in Cincinnati, Boston and Philadelphia. At the time, the hospital said the $200 million cost was footed in part by $150 million in charitable donations.
Research teams are also currently working on COVID-19 research. “This virus is really insidious and it spreads in a very effective way, more so than with many other viruses we’ve ever worked with,” Curran said.
“We already have an investigator, Dr. Barbara Pahud, who has already participated in trials for the COVID-19 vaccine, which we’re now considering putting into children.
“But you can’t just give children the vaccine based on the adult data. You have to run a trial with children of all ages to ensure that there are no unexpected toxicities, because … kids are not little adults. They’re kids.”
This story was originally published November 20, 2020 at 11:59 AM.
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