Registration is now open for the first ever Childx conference, a TED-style conference focused on inspiring innovation in pediatric and maternal health. The conference will bring thought leaders from several disciplines to the Stanford campus April 2 and 3 for two days of conversation about how to harness many branches of medicine to solve the health problems of pregnancy, infancy and childhood.
"Pediatric medicine faces unique challenges," said systems biology researcher Dennis Wall, PhD, 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 include Martin Andrews, who leads Glaxo Smith Kline'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; and Donald Schwarz, MD, the director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as a large cast of Stanford stars 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 healthcare with the most pressing challenges and opportunities in child and maternal health. The inaugural Childx will be the first conference to do so."
The conference will welcome maternal and child health researchers, clinicians, investors, industry experts and interested community members. Early bird registration is open through February 28.
