Research

The first patient in a cellular immunotherapy Phase 1 cancer trial at Seattle Children’s has had a positive response to T-cell therapy. The 23-year-old patient, Lynsie Conradi, from Bellingham, Wash. received the welcome news yesterday. Conradi signed up for the study after experiencing a second relapse of leukemia earlier this year.

The new treatment involves drawing blood from the patient, reprogramming their infection-fighting T-cells to find and destroy cancer cells, and infusing the blood back into their body.

“Results show that Lynsie has had a positive response to the T-cell therapy and, at this time, we do not detect any leukemia cells,” said Rebecca Gardner, MD, principal investigator for the clinical trial.

The next step for Lynsie is a stem cell transplant, with the aim of clearing the cancer from her body. The goal of the immunotherapy cancer trial was to get her to this stage. Read full post »

Young people who come to their doctor’s office for care are often not offered shots that they should have, including those for tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, human papillomavirus and meningococcal disease. “Missed Opportunities for Adolescent Vaccination, 2006-2011” was published June 27 in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

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Headlines these days related to research funding are grim: “Seattle researchers fear federal cuts will costs lives and jobs” and “Show me the money: Is grant writing taking over science?” are two recent stories that ran in the Puget Sound Business Journal and The Guardian, respectively.

The federal government announced in May that the National Institutes of Health 2013 budget will drop by five percent, or $1.71 billion, to $29.15 billion, compared to 2012. The cuts are part of the effort to balance the budget and, based on what our researchers say, are part of the “new normal” moving forward.

But there’s a bright spot here at Seattle Children’s: Philanthropy for research is increasing, and it’s making a difference.

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On the Pulse recently posted a story on bioethics and research from Ben Wilfond, MD. In that story, Wilfond defended a research study that had been criticized by federal officials over the informed-consent requirements. We thought it would be helpful to follow up with tips for parents who are interested in or have children enrolled in research studies. This is the first in what we hope will be a series on the topic, with both parents and researchers weighing in, to increase awareness about research at Seattle Children’s.

As biomedical researchers, my husband and I are both very invested in the research process. Our daughter, Katelyn, has a disease that is incurable, but we are optimistic that her participation in various research studies could have a positive impact on not only her life, but also on the lives of other children in the future. Nevertheless, we take each opportunity to participate in a study under thoughtful consideration before signing our consent.

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Teens have waning enthusiasm for Facebook, according to the latest “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy” report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the ‘drama’ that they described as happening frequently on the site,” the report’s authors said.

But these same teens still feel a need to stay on Facebook so that they don’t miss out on anything – a conclusion that is not a surprise to Megan Moreno, MD, who leads the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. Moreno and her team’s recently-published Facebook influence study details why young people will still stick with the social networking site, despite it losing a bit of its appeal.

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Differences in parental beliefs and attitudes regarding the effects of media on early childhood development may help explain the increasing racial/ethnic disparities in child media viewing/habits, according to a new study by Wanjiku Njoroge, MD, of Seattle Children’s Research Institute.

The findings support national research that preschool-aged children spend considerable time with media, a situation that brings both risks and benefits for cognitive and behavioral outcomes depending on what is watched and how it is watched. A 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation media study, for example, highlighted that ethnically/racially diverse children—specifically African American, Hispanic and Asian children—watch more television than non-Hispanic white children. Read full post »

The announcement last week that 70 medical, research and advocacy groups in 41 countries—including the National Institutes of Health—agreed to share genetic and clinical information made headlines across the country. But to many already working in the “big data” realm, the news is just a welcome addition to the momentum of global projects and alliances already in motion.

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You can’t blame Patient #1 for not wanting to share his name; he’d rather not be known as the guy who swallowed poop in the name of science.

But he does want you to know he is willing to go to extremes to help find a cure for Crohn’s disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes severe abdominal symptoms and robs his body of nutrients.

It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Fecal microbiota transplantation (that’s right – fecal, as in feces, as in poop) is a tried-and-true treatment for recurrent bouts of Clostridium difficile infection (or C. diff), a dangerous intestinal bacteria.

It works by repopulating the intestinal tract with “good” bacteria, which are often wiped out by the antibiotics used as the first line of defense against C. diff. Read full post »

People are more comfortable with black and white, and less so with gray. This isn’t a reference to artwork, but rather the way that things work in the world. There is right and wrong, left and right, and one side of the fence, or the other.

“Gray” happens in medicine and quite frequently in the realm of bioethics, the study of ethical and moral implications of new biomedical discoveries, advances and new and not-so-new procedures. When clinicians grapple with whether an organ transplant should be performed over a family’s objections, for example, that is bioethics.

Alabama-led study under scrutiny

In March, a federal agency known as the Office for Human Research Protections notified the University of Alabama that it was not compliant with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regulations for the protection of human research subjects. UAB was the lead investigator in this study, which included 23 institutions, among them Stanford, Duke, Emory and Yale.

HHS said the risks of the study, which compared the effect of two different oxygen levels in babies’ blood, were not properly communicated to the parents of some 1,300 infants in the permissions forms and that the risks included blindness, neurological damage and death. The study was conducted between 2004 and 2009, and results were published in 2010. Read full post »

A team of our (smart) researchers from SMAHRT descended on Washington, D.C. last weekend for the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting. SMAHRT = Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team, which is based at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. This week, we’ll feature some of their new research. Megan Moreno, MD, leads the group and is a senior author on all of the research studies. Some of the researchers are based at other academic institutions, demonstrating the collaborative spirit of SMAHRT.

As a researcher who is barely out of college myself, it’s interesting when I run focus groups with college students to ask them their opinions about Internet use, because I often share the same views. So when we asked college students what they think about younger generations using social media, their answers weren’t all that surprising to me. Basically, like many parents and pediatricians, college students are worried about the effects of early social media use.

As we all know, the use of social media is widespread and increasing in use among all age groups. While social media provides teenagers and young adults many benefits, including improving communication skills, being able to network with friends and family and staying informed about local and world news, it can also have risks, such as exposure to content that might not be age appropriate, cyberbullying, and even sexting (sending sexually explicit texts or pictures).

In order to gain a unique perspective on this issue, we asked college students to share their thoughts about the potential effects that social media may have on younger adolescents. We chose this population because college students are heavy users of social media and because the current generation of college students did not begin using social media until they were slightly older. We thought this would give them an interesting outlook on how it affects the generation below them.

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