Three Top Children's Hospitals Join to Help Fight Childhood Diseases

Three of the top children's hospitals in the country, Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego, the University of California, San Diego and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, have announced that they are forming an alliance with each other in order to share their research and to ensure that critically ill children with diseases such as cancer have access to the best medical care.

For instance, with this alliance in place, cancer research which is done at St. Jude will be able implemented in the form of clinical trials to treat patients at Rady Children's Hospital. St. Jude is recognized world wide and one of the leaders in pediatric cancer research.

UC San Diego has some of the most renowned biomedical researchers and with this alliance they will be able to collaborate with their counterparts at St. Jude and get their input in the hope that working together they will be able to get a better understanding of chronic disease and hopefully that will in turn lead to an improvement in the cure rates.

At UC San Diego, leading biomedical researchers will collaborate with colleagues at St. Jude to better understand the causes and improve the treatment of catastrophic childhood diseases, including cancer, and work toward the ultimate goal of improving cure rates.

The first clinical trials from St. Jude that will be implemented at Rady Children's Hospital will be ones on new cancer treatments and in the future trials will be implemented relating to other chronic childhood diseases. And the researchers at St. Jude and the researchers at UC San Diego are going to start collaborating on projects such as nanotechnology.

The UC San Diego Department of Pediatrics is already affiliated with Rady Children's and has been since 2001. UC San Diego will be the intermediary by doing the research collaboration and the location where the three institutions will do that actual work of transforming the research into the therapy that will be used in the clinical trials.