Registration open for Childx conference this spring

Early registration is open through Feb. 28 for the inaugural Childx conference, a TED-style conference focused on inspiring innovation in pediatric and maternal health, at http://childx.stanford.edu.

The conference will bring thought leaders from several disciplines to the Stanford campus April 2-3 to discuss how to harness many branches of medicine to solve health problems in pregnancy, infancy and childhood.

“Pediatric medicine faces unique challenges,” said Dennis Wall, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford, who leads the conference’s scientific advisory board. “Most children are quite healthy, which can make it difficult to attract adequate research attention to severe pediatric diseases that affect relatively few children. At the same time, every child’s health status is influenced by a complex array of factors, which cause decades-long ripple effects as today’s children mature into tomorrow’s adults.”

The conference, developed and sponsored by Stanford’s Child Health Research Institute, has five themes:

• Definitive stem cell and gene therapy for child health
• The arc of fetal, developmental/cognitive and adult health
• Accelerating child and maternal health innovation
• Precision medicine for rare and historically untreatable childhood disease
• The health ecosystem and the impact of social, economic, political, environmental and cultural issues on children’s health and well-being

Featured guests will include Alan Guttmacher, MD, head of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Martin Andrews, who leads GlaxoSmithKline’s rare diseases team; Nadia Rosenthal, PhD, founding director of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute; Harvard’s Matthew Gillman, MD, an expert on early life prevention of chronic disease; Sheena Josselyn, PhD, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children, who studies molecular processes behind learning and memory; Donald Schwarz, MD, director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and a large cast of Stanford physicians and researchers from several areas of pediatric medicine.

“Pediatric medicine needs to turn its focus more to creating advanced, technology-enabled solutions that will increase our ability to detect, monitor and treat child health,” Wall said. “No pediatric conference to date has combined these key themes of precision health care with the most pressing challenges and opportunities in child and maternal health. The inaugural Childx will be the first conference to do so.”