SPRINGDALE -- A $500,000 donation to the Arkansas Children's Research Institute will help bring customized and effective treatments for cancer and other ailments to the Arkansas Children's Hospital system, officials announced Friday.
The Ryan Gibson Foundation, named for a Springdale native who died of complications from leukemia, presented the gift on the grounds of the Arkansas Children's Northwest hospital that's set to open early next year. The money will support the research institute's precision medicine program, which can tailor medical treatments based on the genetic code of a patient and of some cancers.
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"This community has always been there for our family, and we will always be grateful," said Derek Gibson, Ryan Gibson's brother, his voice faltering with emotion. "Today is a special day, because we are advancing the cause."
The donation, the Gibson foundation's largest, is part of $1.7 million that will kick start the precision medicine program in the coming years, according to the hospital's foundation. The research will be at the institute in Little Rock, but its findings and progress will inform treatments at the Springdale hospital and other children's hospitals around the country.
Precision medicine is a relatively recent field of study, according to the National Institutes of Health, which provides millions of dollars each year to research. Its power comes from being able to predict intended and unintended effects of different drugs, said Dr. Greg Kearns, the Arkansas institute's chief research officer.
Health-care providers can tweak the amounts of those drugs or choose different ones without the "trial and error" that sometimes comes with traditional treatment, he said.
"It's getting it right the first time," Kearns said. "Every child deserves that, no matter where their ZIP code is."
Though the Arkansas program is beginning with a focus on cancer, Kearns eventually hopes to expand the precision principle to infectious diseases, behavioral therapy and other issues that affect a larger number of children.
"I don't want just to chase the rare things," he said, adding the precision method could some day become "an expectation" in any treatment.
Kearns' hopes fall in line with a wider effort the Institutes of Health began in 2015 called the Precision Medicine Initiative. They're in the process of finding 1 million volunteers nationwide to observe how genes, environment and other characteristics interplay across all diseases and treatments, according to the institutes' website.
"Precision medicine has always been moving fast, but over the last two years or so, it has really accelerated into the clinical space," Jonathan Sheldon, global vice president of Oracle Health Sciences, recently told the online publication HealthIT Analytics.
"Even just five or six years ago, it was more of a research experiment focused on trying to understand the molecular basis of disease. But it has become much more about how you impact clinical care and clinical decisions."
NW News on 04/15/2017