Grants announced for a healthier WA

The first Telethon-Perth Children’s Hospital Research Fund has provided the impetus for 17 projects.

Joint funding from the WA state government and the Channel 7 Telethon Trust will be used to improve follow-up care for pre-term Aboriginal babies, develop a penicillin for rheumatic heart disease and find a curative strategy for cystic fibrosis among other projects.

Most of the 17 projects will be carried out at The University of Western Australia and its affiliates, Princess Margaret Hospital and the Lung Institute of WA.

Each project had the potential to lead to health benefits for WA children and for children nationally and internationally.

Other UWA-based projects include:

• Preventing influenza morbidity and mortality in WA children through vaccination;
• Examining the endocrine, metabolic and psychosocial late-effects of cancer therapy in childhood;
• Discovering the sense of touch: implications for recovery for children with cerebral palsy;
• Assessing the effects of maternal use of opioid pharmacotherapies on health outcomes in exposed children:
• Examining the effects of vitamin D supplementation in infancy on immune development;
• Defining a protective microbiome in otitis media and identification of potential probiotics;
• Postnatal steroids and antenatal chorioamnionitis: between the Scylla and Charybdis of inflammation and apoptosis after pre-term birth;
• Fibre-optic measurement of airway surface liquid pH in children with cystic fibrosis;
• The study and acceptability of mixed whole cell/acellular pertussis vaccine schedules in infants to prevent sensitisation to food allergies: a pilot study;
• Antimicrobial proteins and peptides to prevent late-onset sepsis in per-term infants; and
• Infection or allergy? Understanding the pathogenesis of adeno-tonsillar hypertrophy.