Newswise — LOS ANGELES (February 12, 2015) -- Children’s Hospital Los Angeles announced today that it will make an institutional commitment of $50 million to expand its Center for Personalized Medicine. This investment in leading-edge research and innovation will help unlock the human genome’s potential with the goal of making diagnoses more effective, therapies more targeted and health care more personalized for children. The Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Board of Trustees recently approved the investment in the Center, to be disbursed over the next five years. 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.

“Medicine is on the verge of a new era as game-changing as the discovery of antibiotics,” says Richard D. Cordova, FACHE, president and CEO of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “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.”

Personalized, or precision, medicine is a revolutionary way of practicing medicine in which a patient’s biological profile, as determined by his or her genome, is used to develop individualized lifelong health 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 health care that focuses on preventing, rather than reacting to, illness,” explains 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.”

The Center is led by Judkins and will be part of the hospital’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. The Center’s team will include physicians, scientists, genetic counselors and staff who are internationally recognized for their expertise in genomics, clinical genetics, bioinformatics and molecular diagnostics. Children’s Hospital will also be exploring strategic collaborations with academic, government and health care organizations to share resources and expand the impact that the Center can have on the care of children.

“The move toward personalized medicine has largely focused on adult hospitals and the potential impact of genome sequencing to diagnose and treat adult diseases,” Judkins says. “Here at Children’s Hospital we are making an investment in the health and well-being of kids in L.A., where we can make a real difference and a return on investment across their lifetimes. You don’t know whether the child you are caring for today will be the next President of the United States, the next great American novelist, or the researcher who cures cancer.”

Children’s Hospital’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.”

As the program develops, we will expand our efforts to include genetic conditions such as epilepsy, autism, neurocognitive disorders, congenital heart disease and cleft palate. “Personalized medicine holds the potential to reduce the risk of developing some health disorders for which people are genetically predisposed, such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension,” Judkins says. “Yet, we have unlocked only a fraction of the information that our genes can reveal. At CHLA, we have unique expertise and are internationally recognized for treating many of these disorders in children.”The promise of personalized medicine is significant. With the use of personalized medicine, the Center predicts that, in the future: • Diseases will be diagnosed earlier and more accurately. • Treatments will be safer and more effective. • Visits to the doctor will focus on prevention. • Some conditions will be treated before symptoms ever emerge. Health care costs could decrease significantly due to early diagnoses, intervention and preventive medicine. To this end, the Center’s services and objectives include:• Using research to unravel the genetic basis of disease and create treatment options based on genetic profiles for subsets of patients and, ultimately, individuals• Leading genetics-based pediatric clinical trials • Setting new care standards for the use of personalized medicine in effective diagnosis, treatment and clinical care for children• Discovering therapies, and even cures, for diseases that currently have no effective treatment

As one of the top five pediatric medical facilities in the nation according to U.S. News & World Report, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles made the establishment of the Center a top priority as part of strategic planning efforts. The Center is open to exploring collaborations with other children’s hospitals and its longtime academic partner, the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, seeking alliances that will directly support the institution’s mission of providing lifesaving and life-giving care. “Physicians will have the tools to advise parents about ways to ensure their child’s health from infancy, through adolescence and into adulthood,” Judkins says.

The practice of personalized medicine and the development of targeted treatments will depend on comprehensive, long-term research using vast amounts of genetic data, Judkins says. “Tremendous computing power is essential for scientists to begin to identify the millions of possible combinations of mutations that contribute to illness or disease, and ultimately to make meaningful discoveries that will lead to better treatments,” he says. “The investment necessary to realize the vast potential of personalized medicine at CHLA is large, but the dividends that will be paid in the form of longer and healthier lives for generations of children are enormous.”

About Children’s Hospital Los AngelesChildren's Hospital Los Angeles has been named the best children’s hospital in California and among the top five in the nation for clinical excellence with its selection to the prestigious U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll. Children’s Hospital is home to The Saban Research Institute, one of the largest and most productive pediatric research facilities in the United States. Children’s Hospital is also one of America's premier teaching hospitals through its affiliation since 1932 with the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

For more information, visit CHLA.org. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, or visit our blog: WeTreatKidsBetter.org. #LiveLAGiveLA

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