Pediatric Research

	Did you know? Over the last five years, gifts to the Children's Fund provided $3.7 million of seed funding for research projects to find new treatments for childhood diseases.

Your donation to the Children's Fund can help support groundbreaking research at Packard, helping to ensure that children in the Bay Area benefit from medical discoveries. Research funded through the Children's Fund include:

• A study to develop more effective treatments for children with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.
  
  
• Research into the causes of severe and sometimes fatal gastrointestinal illness in premature infants.
  
  
• A study of why some tumor cells are resistant to chemotherapy.

With the support Children's Fund donors, Joseph DiCarlo, M.D., has developed a new treatment, called hemofiltration, for patients suffering from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), which is one of the leading causes of death in pediatric cancer patients. Among the patients who have received the hemofiltration treatment was 10-year-old Zandalee Springs (right) who, after battling lymphoma, developed ARDS. She was given only a 50-50 chance of survival until DiCarlo stepped in with his experimental treatment. A month later, Zandalee was back at school. Thanks to Children's Fund support, DiCarlo is putting together a consortium of 12 university hospitals in three countries that will test the new therapy on more than 100 children.