I used to tell kids I diagnosed with IBD that I do think we will have a cure at some point in their lifespan.  Sadly, I no longer do that, as I'm not sure we will.  I think for those outside of healthcare and research, the apocalyptic wreckage is not as visible, but the recent shifts in federal funding have more or less cut off the pipeline of future discoveries at the knees, ESPECIALLY in pediatrics.  Even before these changes, peds received about 12% of total research funding (primarily in cancer).  Now, its looking like about 8% of a pie that is about 1/3 as large, and even that is unlikely given the planned dismantling of NICHD and pediatric focused institutions.   Beyond simply not developing new therapies for our kids in the short term, we also are doing critical damage to another pipeline, that of training new scientists.  The grants that utterly vanished in the last year were training and pilot grants, which are commonly achieved by trainee and early career scientists.  The overlapping effect of this is that pediatric research is, broadly, being demolished even beyond the impacts on science as a whole.   

The challenging times call for new models and approaches to research training and early career funding.  At SUNY Downstate our scientists invented the MRI and won the Nobel Prize. Downstate developed the first heart-lung machine; unlocked DNA repair mechanisms; and learned to record and quantitate brain activity, which led to dramatic increases in understanding the hippocampus. In recent years, we have revitalized research training models, increased our research output in pediatrics by 300%, publishing papers in Science, Pediatrics, Gastroenterology, and other flagship journals.  We have discovered a specific gastrointestinal subtype of SARS-CoV2 chronic infection, changed the understanding of endoscopic disparities in pediatrics, redefined our understanding of stunted growth in the developing world, presented our work nationally and internationally, won multiple prizes, and fast become the largest source of new pediatric subspecialists in the country.   

While Downstate has changed medicine nationally and globally, it has played an essential role in keeping Brooklyn healthy as well. If Brooklyn were its own city, it would be the fourth largest in the United States and have multiple academic medical centers, and a standalone children's hospital. However, Downstate is the only institution of its kind in the borough, providing the highest levels of care for our 3 million residents, and the only group positioned to study our patients, who are habitually underrepresented in research, driving many of the disparate outcomes we know exist for low income pediatric patients (which of course is a tremendous bummer, as kids have no say in how much money their family makes). In Brooklyn, there is a seven-year life-expectancy gap between White and Black residents, and a gap as much as 10 years across our Downstate neighborhoods. High rates of chronic diseases, compounded by structural challenges like income inequality, housing instability, and limited access to healthcare, threaten to further widen these disparities if coordinated action is not taken. 

As one of our coordinated actions, we are thrilled to share the creation of the Schwarz Pediatric Research in Novel Topics (SPRINT) fund at SUNY Downstate, to drive small pilot funding in novel areas, ranging from work in underserved communities to pilot concepts or discovery work, and specifically targeting trainees and early career faculty for funding. This fund is based around the incredible career of Steven Schwarz, a personal mentor, friend, and a founder of pediatric gastroenterology. Dr. Schwarz, recognized by the AAP with the Murray Davidson Award (think lifetime achievement award in pediatric GI), is a storied NIH investigator, former chair of pediatrics, former chief of peds GI, astoundingly successful medical educator, and one of the ringleaders of the appropriately named "old farts club" of the physicians who created our field and still drive new discoveries and care.

Dr. Schwarz embodied the idea that there are so many, many ways for us to achieve professional success (although typically we don't do so in just so many different domains), driving his mentees and trainees to chase their dreams and goals, and recognizing that the best work starts with someone with passion. To carry on the somewhat incredible legacy of Dr. Schwarz, we are seeking to create an endowed fund that will provide annual pilot grant funding to our clinicians and trainees. In the modern world, astounding capabilities are at our fingertips, for ever decreasing quantities of money. The ability of pilot funding to create new concepts, new opportunities, is unparalleled, and with the recent collapse of federal research funding, pilot funding is the most critical at this time.

With pilot funding, we can generate new ideas, new concepts, publish meaningful if not lucrative work. We can advance our understanding of pediatric health, our care of disease, and open up new fields. We at SUNY Downstate are experts in efficient use of research funding, and will spin your pennies into gold for kids in Brooklyn and all over the world, if you let us.