Nearly $20 Million in Funding Will Support Improvements in Pediatric Heart and Surgical Care Worldwide

Thanks to funding from a variety of sources, work being done within the Cincinnati Children’s Heart Institute has international implications—from fostering global collaboration on heart surgeries to battling rheumatic fever worldwide. The following highlight recent sources of funding and how we aim to improve child health around the globe as a result. 

$2.7M in funding to make virtual surgical metaverse a reality 

Cardiothoracic surgeon David L.S. Morales, MD, and pediatric cardiologist Ryan A. Moore, MD, have received $2.7 million in funding from the Turner Farm Foundation. These funds are targeted for work the doctors are doing with Unity Technologies and the Cincinnati Children’s Digital Experience Technologies team to enhance their virtual surgical planning platform. 

This platform allows surgeons to pre-plan a surgery in a virtual space, providing the ability for a surgeon to “walk through the heart” and sequence surgical pathways prior to an operation. Its multi-user functionality means the Cincinnati Children’s team can meet in the virtual space with other institutions both in the United States and in foreign countries. 

This Turner Farm Foundation funding, combined with an expert development team from Unity Technologies working alongside Cincinnati Children’s Digital Experience Technology developers, accelerates the timeline for Morales and Moore to create a functional metaverse in the next two years. 

Turner Farm Foundation is dedicated to supporting healthcare training and education both nationally and internationally. Their funds will allow for making the platform multilingual and scaling the technology to other specialties beyond cardiology. 

$8M grant to create a rheumatic fever network 

Pediatric cardiologist Andrea Beaton, MD, was awarded an $8 million grant from the Leducq Foundation for her proposal to establish an Acute Rheumatic Fever Diagnosis Collaborative Network. The foundation awarded the grant because they believe her work “has the potential to lead to a diagnostic test for acute rheumatic fever, thus making an important contribution to efforts to eliminate rheumatic heart disease.” 

The grant comes less than a year after Beaton and colleagues published significant findings in The New England Journal of Medicine demonstrating that antibiotic treatment can significantly reduce the risk of underlying rheumatic heart disease progression in children and adolescents. 

Developing improved diagnostic tests for the condition is important because, in low-resource settings, 85% of children with rheumatic heart disease are diagnosed only after the disease has become well-advanced, making medications ineffective and surgical intervention—if available—less likely to succeed. 

$7.9M grant to further studies on latent rheumatic heart disease 

Beaton has also been awarded a $7.9 million grant by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to pursue a follow-up study on latent rheumatic heart disease (RHD).  

The original study, conducted in Uganda by Beaton’s team, found that children with latent RHD who receive prophylaxis with intramuscular penicillin are less likely to progress at two years. However, scaling early initiation of this prophylaxis for RHD has many challenges, including substantial patient and health system-level barriers.

This new grant will fund a follow-up study to determine the effectiveness of injectable antibiotics as compared to oral antibiotics, a potentially more practical solution in low-resource settings. The study will measure the costs, impact on quality of life, and patient and parent satisfaction of both approaches. 

This study is another important step in eradicating a disease that disproportionately affects children in low-resource settings around the world. 

Morales, who is executive co-director of the Heart Institute, says receiving both donations and grants comes with a significant responsibility. “One of our tenets is increasing access to care for kids who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get the care they need,” he says. “Our work affords us the ability to attract generous support from a variety of sources. In turn, we have both the privilege and the responsibility to continue working to improve child health on a global level.”