Research

Marilee Killpack describes the birth of her fourth son, Abram, as “magical.”

After a typical, full-term pregnancy, Abram was born in Provo, Utah, weighing 9 pounds. He seemed to be healthy and strong, with one exception: He had petechiae all over his body — red dots that appear on the skin when tiny blood vessels break.

Providers suspected the marks were bruises from his quick birth, but blood tests revealed his platelets were extremely low and his immune system was not making enough antibodies to fight infections.

Abram was taken to the neonatal intensive care unit at his local hospital for platelet and immunoglobulin infusions. Still, his blood counts continued to drop. The family was transferred to a nearby children’s hospital where providers determined he had mononucleosis, which they suspected was causing his immune deficiency.

“They said he would be fine in a few months and sent us home,” Killpack remembers.

But Abram was not fine. He developed severe, uncontrollable eczema when he was 3 weeks old.

“His body was shredded,” Killpack said. “We tried everything — lotions, oils, anything we could think of — but nothing worked. He was screaming; he was in so much pain.”

When providers saw Abram’s skin, they immediately sent a sample of his blood for genetic testing. They suspected he might have a rare, life-threatening disorder called Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome (WAS). Read full post »

The author with her daughter, Mariana, 7. Mariana has a rare disease called Pfeiffer Syndrome.

Often in life we have a vision of what we want or imagine our lives to be like, but along that journey, life presents obstacles and opportunities for us. It shapes us and makes us who we are.

My own journey started with its own twists and turns. I was born in Medellin, Colombia and moved to Seattle with my mom at the age of 7. Two months later I got sick. I couldn’t stop throwing up and had a hard time waking up. A year after being hospitalized on and off at Seattle Children’s, I was diagnosed with a cavernous malformation and had brain surgery two months later. My chances of surviving the surgery were small. In Colombia I would have died, but Seattle Children’s saved my life.

When I gave birth to my daughter, Mariana, 27 years later, I never imagined that she too would face a serious medical condition. Much of my life was impacted by my medical condition, but it was nothing compared to what our family would experience as we learned Mariana had an incurable rare disease. It was the beginning of a life-changing journey for our family. Read full post »

Summer school is in session for researchers at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, and although there are text books and a final exam, very little else about the biology course taught by Dr. Philip Morgan and his fellow scientist and wife, Dr. Margaret Sedensky, is business as usual. That’s because their students are Tibetan monks and their classroom is at a monastic university in southern India. Read full post »

Dr. Andy Shih is studying how tiny strokes called microinfarcts develop and impact the developing brain.

Strokes come in many shapes and sizes. In children and adults, strokes often present sudden limb or facial numbness, confusion and dizziness.

But some strokes that cause clots to develop in the small blood vessels of the brain don’t exhibit any symptoms at all. Studies have shown that hundreds to thousands of these small, asymptomatic strokes, known as microinfarcts, likely occur over the course of decades in adult brains and may contribute to cognitive decline as we age. Even less is known about the occurrence and consequences of microinfarcts in young, developing brains.

Enter Dr. Andy Shih, principal investigator at Seattle Children’s Research Institute’s Center for Developmental Biology and Regenerative Medicine. Shih hopes to solve the mystery of microinfarcts by using advanced optical imaging — modeling them in the lab and visualizing their effects in real-time. On the Pulse sat down with Shih to learn more about his work and how he’s applying his discoveries from studying dementia in aging brains to understanding how blood vessels and clots first emerge in the brain. Read full post »

Sonny D’Ambrosio, age 7, here with his parents, was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition called IPEX as an infant.

Earlier this year, Nicole D’Ambrosio found herself in front of a room full of scientists that were gathered in part to discuss their progress on a novel cell therapy that has the potential to one day save her son’s life.

She had been asked to present her family’s story as part of a company-wide meeting at Casebia Therapeutics in Boston. As she began, she recounted how her only child, 7-year-old Sonny, has reached the brink of death more times than she can remember because of the rare autoimmune disorder he was diagnosed with as an infant. How the bone marrow transplant he received was the only thing that could save him, but caused endless complications, including skin necrosis and epilepsy.

How the thought of going through another transplant when the initial transplant failed compelled her and her husband to pack up their home and move 3,000 miles west to seek other options. How she lies awake at night praying that Sonny’s body can stay strong enough until a safer treatment comes along. How, despite everything he’s been through, Sonny is still a happy little boy with a wicked sense of humor. Read full post »

Madeline Boese, with her mom Terri, cancer-free after a 12-year battle with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

When Madeline Boese was 14, she had visions of pointe shoes, tutus and sugar plums dancing in her head. She dreamed of becoming a professional ballerina, and hoped for a future in the spotlight doing what she loved.

Unfortunately, her body had different plans.

One day in ballet class in December 2006, she noticed an odd golf ball-sized lump on her left thigh below her pink tights. Her mom, Terri Boese, said a trip to their doctor in their hometown of Plano, Texas, led to a bone-chilling discovery.

“I was terrified when I heard ‘malignancy detected,’” Boese said. “It was awful and so out of the blue. I felt like I was going to hyperventilate, and it took all I had to hold myself together.”

Madeline was immediately referred to a hospital in Dallas where she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). From there, Boese said everything moved rapidly as Madeline began what would be two and a half years of grueling chemotherapy treatment.

Read full post »

Dr. Richard James is leading research to edit human B plasma cells to act as cell factories capable of delivering sustained, high doses of a therapeutic protein.

Scientists at Seattle Children’s Research Institute are paving the way to use gene-edited B cells – a type of white blood cell in the immune system – to treat a wide range of potential diseases that affect children, including hemophilia and other protein deficiency disorders, autoimmune diseases, and infectious diseases. If successful, their research would open the door to offering this experimental cell therapy as the first-of-its-kind in clinical trials at Seattle Children’s in as soon as five years. Read full post »

Drs. Nana Minkah (back) and Deba Goswami are working with their Kappe Lab colleagues to develop a vaccine for malaria.

Growing up in Ghana, a sub-Saharan country on the west coast of Africa, Dr. Nana Minkah, a scientist at the Kappe Lab, endured the unenviable “rite of passage” contracting malaria multiple times as a child.

While he doesn’t remember the early years when the associated high fever caused hallucinations, he has distinct memories of later bouts when he was bedridden for more than a week with pain and chills so bad his body visibly shivered.

The multiple malaria infections Minkah endured in his youth is common to those living in sub-Saharan Africa where the mosquito-transmitted parasitic infection is one of the deadliest diseases in human history. Despite tremendous attempts to rid the world of the malaria pathogens, it continues to sicken hundreds of millions and kills nearly half a million people each year. Malaria’s biggest toll is on children and pregnant women in developing countries.

That’s why, after Minkah completed his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, he joined the Kappe Lab in 2015. Although he had no experience in parasitology, he wanted to work on malaria — a disease that continues to plague his homeland.

“I wanted to do work that has clinical implications with the potential to save the lives of people who look like me,” Minkah explained. Read full post »

At 5 months old, Tyler Cassinelli, now 3, was battling both liver cancer and intractable epilepsy. When he was at Seattle Children’s preparing to undergo cancer treatment, Tyler had a seizure that stopped his breathing.

“It was one of the scariest moments of my life,” said Jane Cassinelli, Tyler’s mother. “We could see his stats on the monitor dropping, and doctors came rushing in.”

Doctors quickly intubated and revived Tyler. Five months later, his cancer was in remission. However, he continued to have unpredictable and life-threatening seizures that multiple medications failed to stop.

Genetic testing revealed that Tyler had a mutation of the HCN1 gene. Children with this rare abnormality are at risk for traumatic epilepsies, said Dr. Nino Ramirez, director of the Center for Integrative Brain Research.

“It was difficult to hear that Tyler was expected to have a lifetime of hard-to-control seizures due to a genetic disorder,” said Cassinelli.

In addition to the mutation, Tyler had a brain malformation called focal cortical dysplasia, a common cause of intractable epilepsy. Testing showed Tyler’s seizures were coming from an area on the left side of his brain. Brain surgery to address the problematic lesion could help, and what’s more, his brain could also enable researchers to unlock some of the mysteries of the genetic mutation.

“Tyler’s situation was unique and extremely desperate,” said Ramirez. “There is great clinical interest worldwide in better understanding the HCN1 mutation, and Tyler’s brain could provide a rare window into its role in epilepsy.” Read full post »

Trainees in Africa participate in a pilot study of a virtual reality simulation that teaches care providers how to care for a newborn unable to breathe on their own.

Wanting to do something different to address the alarmingly high number of newborn deaths in low income countries, Dr. Rachel Umoren, a neonatologist at Seattle Children’s, turned to virtual reality (VR).

As mobile phone-based VR programs became increasingly accessible, Umoren thought the emerging technology could offer a better way to equip health care providers with the skills necessary to save babies’ lives in low- and middle-income countries with high neonatal mortality rates.

Her case was compelling: with mobile VR training, providers could learn and easily maintain new skills at their own convenience, on their own smartphone, and with game-based automated feedback that is ideal for learning. With its on-demand availability, she believed mobile phone-based VR training could effectively translate into clinical practice better than current training methods.

“Mobile technologies are ubiquitous in low and middle income countries, yet they are relatively untested at disseminating health care information or training in these settings,” Umoren said. “I wanted to see how we could apply innovations in virtual reality to address the pressing issue of neonatal mortality.” Read full post »