Your Impact

From the start of CMRF in the US, we have raised more than $10 million from generous Americans who believe that every sick child deserves every chance at health and happiness.

This includes $5 million raised since 2012 that reinvigorated the aging St. Theresa’s Cardiac Ward – which, at more than 60 years old and hosting more than 550 patients annually, was failing to provide the best possible experience for patients and families. But through the commitment and support of people like you, we were able to give back the highest level of care, comfort and dignity to patients and families.

Thank you for saving lives

Your gifts make a significant impact on diagnosing and healing sick children

Read our Annual Report

Look Toward the Future

Supporting the next generation of researchers – Clinical Research Fellowship

Since 2010 we have supported 55 Clinical Researcher Fellowships. A child suffering from an illness feels the impact of that battle every day, as do their parents and family members caring for them. All children should have the opportunity to play, laugh, and enjoy life as much as possible, but these illnesses can be limiting.

The Clinical Research Fellowship is aimed at medical doctors, nurses and allied health professionals working in paediatrics. It is designed to offer a range of options to encourage research across a spectrum of clinical activities. These awards aim to instil and foster research as part of clinical practice, and to ensure that research is directly relevant to the sick child. Our researchers radically improve these children’s quality of life through cutting edge medical research, faster diagnoses, innovative treatments, and personalized medical plans.

Tackling the most pressing research questions today

CMRF Inc are working with our partner in Ireland, Children’s Health Foundation, who has entered a multi-year strategic partnership with Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to fund essential research. This venture is part of SFI’s Frontiers for the Future Programme, which provides opportunities for independent investigators to conduct highly innovative, collaborative research with the potential to deliver impact, whilst also providing opportunities for high-risk, high-reward research projects. The goal of this joint venture is to create a robust and impactful research grant programme that will enable paediatric researchers in Children’s Health Ireland to tackle the most pressing challenges facing sick children. This will include research into the areas like: Immunology, Cardiology, Oncology, Gastroenterology, and Neuroscience. However, it is not limited to this, the nature of this programme is to fund new and higher risk independent researchers whose focus and methods are inventive.

Some of projects that your support is funding:

PLATYPus project: Preterm infant immunomodulation to treat sepsis and brain injury Prevention

Preterm birth is the world's leading cause of death in children under 5 years. Preterm infants have a high risk of infection due to alterations in their immune system that are not completely understood. Inflammation is the body's normal response to infection and although it is essential for resolving infections when uncontrolled it can cause damage to the body. In preterm infants, infections and inflammation in the intestine (necrotising enterocolitis) can result in brain injury. This research project studies new tests that will help to predict outcome and response to treatment and help parents with planning healthcare needs for their baby.

Identifying the mechanism of action of a novel therapeutic target during the earliest phases of IBD onset in childhood.

Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) is a life-long chronic intestinal inflammatory condition comprising of separate disease manifestations known as ulcerative colitis (UC) and crohns disease (CD) which are increasingly being first diagnosed during childhood. While many new treatment options have emerged over the past 20 years there remains a very high number of patients for whom these approaches are ineffective. Moreover, understanding of how disease develops during its earliest phases, when therapeutic intervention will likely be most beneficial, is relatively poor. This proposal will uncover precisely how a new target pathway for IBD mediates the initiation of disease during childhood.

Understanding and exploiting dysregulated mitochondrial metabolism and epigenetics for the therapy of MYCN-driven neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma is one of the deadliest childhood cancers that mainly originates from the adrenal glands. Half of the children with neuroblastoma have an aggressive disease with only 40-50% of children surviving to 5 years. Research shows that when a transcription factor called MYCN is present in multiple copies, the disease is aggressive. Unfortunately, there is no treatment specifically targeting MYCN in the clinic. The aim of this proposal is i) to better understand a novel role of MYCN in the development of this cancer and ii) to develop more effective approaches to treat children with MYCN-driven neuroblastoma.

The impact of E-cigarettes on Childhood Health Outcomes (ECHO) study

Tobacco smoking in pregnancy is now widely accepted as having adverse health outcomes for both the mother and foetus. However, there is very little known about the long-term health impact of exposure of unborn babies to e-cigarettes during pregnancy. The ECHO study will determine what the long-term health outcomes are in children born to mothers who use e-cigarettes during pregnancy. The research team plan to recruit pregnant women at booking visit and follow them and their infants for two years. Specifically, the research team would like to focus on birth, nutritional, brain development and respiratory outcomes in children.