Projects at The University of Western Australia to reduce the impact of climate change on the health and wellbeing of children and another looking at new strategies for childhood and adolescent sarcoma are among those to share in over $6m in funding from the WA Child Research Fund grant program.

The program, administered annually by the Department of Health through the Office of Medical Research and Innovation, is providing grants of up to $600,000 over three years in 2022-23 to support 11 diverse research projects in the area of child and adolescent health in WA.

They include ‘Kids are not small adults’, a project by The Kids Research Institute Australia and The University of Western Australia which will carry out the first preclinical assessment of age-appropriate immunotherapies for childhood cancers.

Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the UWA Medical School and Telethon Kids Cancer Centre Co-Head of Brain Tumour Research Raelene Endersby is leading this work to help identify new, effective, and safe treatments - specifically for children with cancer - to take into WA-led clinical trials.

Director of the WA Burns Service and Co-Program Head, Perioperative Care at Telethon Kids, Professor Fiona Wood, has been funded for a UWA/Telethon Kids project to better understand the lifelong impact of paediatric burns on health, which aims to find out why some children cannot respond to vaccines after a burn.

Senior lecturer at UWA’s School of Biomedical Sciences Dr Mark Cruikshank will look at oxidative stress as a therapeutic target for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Professor Peter Le Souef from the UWA Medical School will use geospatial mapping to discover how WA kids’ health has been impacted by climate change, now seen as the major threat to our future children’s health.

Assistant Professor at UWA’s School of Biomedical Sciences Jason Waithman will use funds research new treatments for sarcoma, a type of cancer that starts in tissues like bone or muscle. 

Senior Research Fellow Dr Ruth Thornton from the UWA Centre for Child Health Research and Telethon Kids will test new therapies for children with middle ear infection and Adjunct Associate Professor Lea-Ann Kirkham, also from UWA Centre for Child Health Research, will spearhead a project on optimising manufacture and dosing strategies for a vaccine for middle ear infection. 

Associate Professor Laurens Manning from Telethon Kids and the UWA Centre for Child Health Research will lead a ‘Good paths for healthy hearts project’ aiming to bring choice and flexibility to long-acting penicillins for rheumatic heart disease.

Telethon Kids’ Dr Debbie Palmer, an Adjunct Senior Research fellow at the UWA Medical School and UWA Centre for Child Health Research, has received funding for a five-year follow up of the SYMBA study, promoting gut health (symbiosis) with prebiotic fibre for prevention of allergic disease.

Dr Janessa Pickering from Telethon Kids and the Centre for Child Health Research will look at harnessing natural protection to improve the design of the Streptococcus vaccine and for primary prevention of Acute Rheumatic Fever.

And Professor Stephen Stick from the UWA Medical School, Centre for Child Health research and head of the Wal-yan Respiratory Research Centre has been funded for his project, ‘Close encounters of the nasal mucosa’ which will look at identifying mechanisms that determine responses to infection in children following first contact with respiratory viral pathogens.