Digestive Health Center: Bench to Bedside Research in Pediatric Digestive Disease

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DESCRIPTION, OVERALL (provided by applicant): The overall goal of our Digestive Health Center (DHC): Bench-to-Bedside Research in Pediatric Digestive Disease is to promote research that will yield insights into the fundamental processes and pathogenic mechanisms of digestive disease in children and generate innovative treatment to restore digestive health. The aims of our DHC are to foster research and promote interdivisional and interdepartmental collaboration to achieve an even greater critical mass in digestive disease research and to focus on translational research opportunities. Specifically, our long term goals are to improve child health through better diagnosis, treatments and outcomes for our four key targeted focus areas and diseases including Chronic Liver Disease, Digestive Organ (Liver and Intestinal) Failure and Transplantation, Inflammatory and Diarrheal Diseases, and Obesity. Each focus area represents an important area of potential impact on digestive health for children, provides an opportunity to advance the national research agenda, represents an area of tremendous strength and resource investment at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and affords a direct opportunity to integrate research into patient care. The focus areas are linked by three highly innovative Biomedical Research Cores, Gene Expression and Sequencing, Bioinformatics, and Integrative Morphology, and by a Clinical Component of the Administrative Core to facilitate patient-based research. Collectively they form a powerful infrastructure that fosters the development of personalized and predictive medical approaches based on the genetics of these complex Gl diseases, and of therapies that take into account basic mechanisms of disease. Moreover, clinical and research teams are in place for each of these key focus areas and important digestive diseases. Our approach is to support disease based research across the continuum of research; in our working model, laboratory discoveries generate translational research opportunities that lead to more definitive patient oriented studies such as clinical trials. In addition to advancing the understanding of pediatric digestive disease, the goals of our DHC include the recruitment of established investigators to the study of our four focus areas, enhancing collaboration among DHC investigators and encouraging the development of young investigators committed to pursuing research careers in pediatric digestive disease. These goals are fostered by Pilot/Feasibility awards as well as an enrichment program of seminars, workshops and symposia. Our success as a "minicenter" in significantly enlarging the Research Base, enhancing new collaborations, developing our unique focus and contributing to cutting edge research in pediatric digestive disease by the use of the Biomedical Research Cores and obtaining strong institutional support is strongly predictive of our even greater progress as a full DDRCC.