At Connecticut Children’s we are bringing cutting-edge research to the bedside. Working together with UConn, Jackson Labs and Hartford Healthcare we can make more children healthy.

Pediatric research is the key to understanding childhood diseases, chronic conditions and injuries, and can lead to the development of new medicines, treatments, or approaches to caring for youth. Many innovations in child health that might be familiar — such as preventing sudden infant death syndrome, saving lives with car seats and safety belts, vaccinations for myriad deadly childhood diseases, and improvement in survival rate of some childhood cancers from 20% to 90% — have come about because of years of research.

Pediatric researchers bring this cutting-edge science to the bedside. Yet medical research, particularly pediatric research, is at a time of peril. The competition for limited federal research funding becomes more intense with each passing year. Funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is distributed unevenly. According to NIH.gov, pediatric research received only 12.6% of available NIH research dollars in 2020, while children under 18 account for 22.3% of the U.S. population.

NIH funding for Alzheimer’s research increased 450% from 2013-2020; funding for pediatric research increased 66%.

Our vision at Connecticut Children’s is to make the children of Connecticut the healthiest in the country. Research is essential for us to achieve this goal. While many in the region know us for our clinical care, fewer recognize the transformational research and innovation that is performed by our faculty and staff. Most don’t know that we have a leading inflammatory bowel disease research program, or that we have performed gene therapy in rare diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy or glycogen storage disease.

Others will be surprised that we are one of only eight programs funded to investigate COVID-19-related inflammatory disease, or that our injury prevention center has been a leader in research on firearms, child safety seats, and now teen suicide. How about our chief of surgery’s innovative research in the development of an artificial esophagus, which might not save only children with congenital abnormalities but adults with cancer? Meanwhile, the therapy of every child with cancer seen at Connecticut Children’s is determined by carefully designed research protocols.

To ensure the health of Connecticut’s children, we have launched the Connecticut Children’s Research Institute (CCRI). That’s where we are coalescing our research efforts while planning for the future. Much of our success now and then will focus on collaboration with our strong neighbors at the UConn medical school and Jackson Laboratories, where our translational science research is carried out, as well as at Hartford Healthcare and UConn. Collaborations such as these leverage the synergistic abilities of our partners to advance child health research and child well-being and move closer to our goal of being the focal point of pediatric health research and innovation in Connecticut.

Why is this important? For two reasons. First, in order to advance pediatric health care, we must provide direct connections between patient care and cutting-edge researchers. Every child who comes to Connecticut Children’s should have the opportunity to be cared for by clinicians who are working in a culture of innovation and advancement. The crises that afflict our youth, such as discrimination, obesity and mental health, need a broad population health focus with research at its core.

Secondly, CCRI will generate economic opportunity. Our partnerships with academic institutions as well as industry promise to bring more investment to central Connecticut. CCRI will be a magnet for child health researchers seeking an opportunity to flourish, bringing the best and brightest to our region. These are the leaders we want to care for our children.

In 2021, CCRI received over $13 million in grant funding from federal and private sources. We recognize we will need more to achieve our vision. Research grants alone won’t get us there.

Every day our investigators work to secure more funding, often taking them away from research at the bench or bedside. We are actively mentoring our junior faculty and fellows to be leaders in research and innovation, but development can take years and is costly. Notably, national centers of pediatric research excellence at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City and Lurie Children’s in Chicago have recently received strong local support to achieve their goals.

We look to Connecticut to support our vision for our children, for their health and for their future.

William T. Zempsky and Juan C. Salazar are physicians at Connecticut Children’s and professors of pediatrics at UConn. Salazar is the physician-in-chief at Children’s.