The Morgan Center for Research and Innovation expands Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's state-of-the-art research environment. Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Susan Furth invited Audrey Odom John, MD, PhD, to discuss her involvement with planning her new lab space, and how new technologies and opportunities for collaboration will bolster her research within the Immunology and Infectious Diseases Research Initiative.

With an anticipated end-of-year opening of the 17-story, 350,000 square-foot Morgan Center for Research & Innovation, Dr. Sue Furth invited Donald Moore, senior vice president of CHOP’s Real Estate, Facilities, and Operations, to discuss how the project came to fruition, what researchers and the Philadelphia community can look forward to experiencing, and how Moore helped facilitate the project to its completion.

In the second installment of our Power of Philanthropy series, host Susan Furth, MD, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at CHOP, chats with Laura Adang, MD, PhD, an attending physician in the Division of Neurology. Dr. Adang's research is grounded in years of learning, relationship-building, and collaboration with patients, families, and family-founded organizations who raise funds and awareness for research into leukodystrophies, a group of rare neurological disorders.

In the first part of our Bench to Bedside series focused on the transformative power of donations, gifts, and investments to support pediatric research, Monica Taylor Lotty, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia’s Chief Development Officer, shares the deeply heartfelt reasons behind philanthropy, which, at its core, “literally means love of humanity”.  

Learn more about how you can support children's health by contacting the CHOP Foundation: https://www.chop.edu/giving

Today’s high throughput sequencing techniques empower researchers to sequence a genome, epigenome, and transcriptome faster than ever before. At Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute, Teodora Orendovici, PhD, Technical Director of the High Throughput Sequencing Core (HTS), is a passionate expert and leader devoted to ensuring all investigators, regardless of their research interests and goals, have access to the most advanced sequencing technologies. Accessibility and equity is critical, says Dr. Orendovici, if we are to develop a world where personalized medicine becomes possible for all patients. 

In the second part of our Explore the Cores series, Florin Tuluc, MD, PhD, Director of the Flow Cytometry Core Laboratory at CHOP Research Institute, sits down with host Susan Furth, MD, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, to talk about what makes the Flow Lab a unique and valuable resource for the CHOP scientific community. Spoiler: It’s one-part state-of-the-art technology and two parts a team of incredible individuals with a passion for pediatric health.

Have you ever wondered how, and where, biospecimen samples go after a patient gives consent for its use in research? The latest guest of our Bench to Bedside podcast, David Stokes, PhD, is the Technical Director of the Biorepository Resource Center at CHOP, a core facility that serves all of CHOP’s biobanking needs. With the unique capacity to store 3 million samples and the highly advanced infrastructure to keep the specimens organized, preserved, and accessible to the research community, the BioRC also houses immense hope for breakthroughs in children’s health. Listen in as Dr. Stokes shares how the BioRC has evolved over a decade to become one of CHOP’s most unique and valuable research resources.

Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, has revolutionized how physicians and scientists treat and study disease. According to Theodore Laetsch, MD, an oncologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, this ability to track and tailor individual patients’ unique genetic signatures has the most transformative potential in pediatric cancer. In this episode of Bench to Bedside, Dr. Laetsch shares how his new Frontier Program, the Center for Precision Medicine for High-risk Pediatric Cancer, harnesses advanced technologies and a growing multi omics database to optimize outcomes for childhood cancer patients.

From pathology to prognosis, heart failure in children appears vastly different than it does in adults. How we study, approach, and ultimately treat the disease should too, according to Joseph Rossano, MD, chief of the Division of Cardiology at CHOP. As director of the Advanced Cardiac Therapies for Heart Failure Patients Frontier Program, Dr. Rossano aims to bring cutting-edge scientific discoveries from the bench to the bedside with this in mind.