The generous support of West Australians through Channel 7’s Telethon Trust will help support crucial child health research at The Kids Research Institute Australia in 2022, for projects to tackle childhood cancer, common skin infections, breast feeding and the growing problem of screentime for young children.
More than a million dollars will go towards the The Kids Cancer Centre to support research into immunotherapy treatments for all childhood cancers, in the hope of developing more treatments that use the child’s own immune system to fight the disease and reducing the need for more toxic treatments like radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Additionally, Professor Terrance Johns, Director of the The Kids Cancer Centre, has received funding from Telethon to develop new treatments for neuroblastoma – a potentially deadly cancer of the nerve cells which tragically mostly affects babies and children under the age of five.
Professor Johns said the study would focus on genetic profiling to determine why some neuroblastoma cells are so resistant to treatment.
“We will also work to establish new immunotherapy approaches for neuroblastoma because there has been limited success in this area so far,” he said.
The support of the Channel 7 Telethon trust will help us to build an exceptional research program to develop urgently-needed new treatments for this cruel disease.
A team of researchers examining how screentime in the first year of life impacts early development will be able to build on their existing work, thanks to the support of Telethon. The study will seek to recruit 90 Western Australian families with a child under two, to develop and pilot an innovative new intervention that will support families to better manage healthy screen time levels and broader development.
Project Co-Investigator, Mary Brushe, said the impact of screentime in early childhood is one of the looming public health challenges of this decade.
“By the time a child is in primary school, those screen time patterns are already established so it’s too late,” she said.
“Our previous research shows that we’ve got some kids who at six months old are being exposed to over seven hours of screens a day. They may not always be actively watching the screen, but certainly that reflects time they’ve spent with a screen on in the same room.
“There is an urgent need to develop effective ways to support parents to reduce the amount of screen time their children are watching and develop ‘screen hygiene’ to address harmful types of exposure.”
Head of the Healthy Skin and Acute Rheumatic Fever team at the Wesfarmers Centre for Vaccines and Infectious Diseases, Associate Professor Asha Bowen, has received support for a project that aims to uncover the rate of skin infections in Aboriginal children living in urban areas.
“Untreated skin infections result in hospitalisation, life-threatening bloodstream infections and rheumatic heart disease,” she said.
“We will work in partnership with Elders and community to determine how common skin infections are and identify sustainable, community-wide strategies for prevention.”
The generous support of Principal partner Channel 7 Telethon Trust also contributes essential funding to support our best and brightest researchers and all research outputs at the Institute.
The Kids Executive Director, Professor Jonathan Carapetis, said Telethon is a vital supporter of all the ground-breaking child health research conducted at the Institute.
Telethon’s support means so much to our dedicated researchers, as well as the communities and families who benefit from the findings we make at the institute. We are able to take on some of the most difficult challenges in child health research, knowing that we have the support of the West Australian public, through Telethon.