Research at Shriners Children’s

Research fits into the mission of Shriners Children's by providing innovation and thereby developing treatments and things that are going to improve the quality of lives, the families that we serve. The mission of research is to create tools and establish partnerships to advance clinical research and also raise our international profile in terms of innovation. We want to be an innovative children's healthcare system. The Shriners Research Department has a grants program, which is open to all medical staff and scientific staff in our hospitals. We currently have 75 projects funded through this system. Each of these grants is peer reviewed. We have a research advisory board of over 80 people from across the country who review these grants to make sure that we have quality and innovation and significance in all these projects.

Of those projects that we fund, 16 are multi-site, which means they involve multiple different hospitals in one project. And we've built that up over the years with the goal of making discoveries that are going to improve the lives of the children we treat. We established a genomics institute in 2019, and since that time, we've been collecting samples from not only our clinical sites in North America, that includes Montreal and Mexico City, but also our international outreach seats. So we are an international genomic samples. We collected over 15,000 samples thus far. We're going to keep increasing that and we're going to keep working on the clinical utility. This will impact how we treat.

As we build our international genomics program, we are building tools to share this information with other healthcare systems, both nationally and internationally. And as we progress, that database is going to increase. We're going to get more and more information, and we're going to get more and more variants in genetics that we can translate to actually helping clinically. I think that's really our strength, and that's what we've been very fortunate that our philanthropy has supported since the inception of the Genomics Institute.

Our research transforms our care because we are adapting and discovering cutting edge tools that are going to help our kids. It's as simple as that. If you're not out there looking at the best and brightest and latest discoveries, you're going to fall behind, and the kids are not going to benefit from the discoveries that we need to be making for them. And that's why research as part of our tripartite mission, I think is critical to the future of Shriners Children's.

[Shriners Children's logo]