About the Institute

The Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation will bring together surgeons and researchers to improve children’s lives before, during, and after surgery.  The Institute will focus on four initiatives that together will open a new era for pediatric surgery:

• Pain medicine -- To alleviate and eventually eliminate pain
• Immunology --  To use a child’s own immune system to fight illness and cure disease
• Bioengineering -- To harness the full power of science and technology to make treatment more precise
• Personalized medicine -- To tailor treatment for every child depending on their own genetic makeup

Children Free of Pain

Pain is one of the most challenging and misunderstood issues in pediatric care, and has a significant impact on the surgical outcomes of children. The Pain Medicine Initiative will pioneer solutions for children in pain through the development of the first device to provide an objective measure of pain. Once physicians can measure pain accurately, they will be more able to eliminate it with new medications and treatments. Scientists will also unravel the genetic markers that show which child will react best to which medication for optimal efficacy. The benefit to children will be the elimination of pain and improved surgical outcomes.

Unprecedented Precision

Driven by dramatic advances in computer technology, bioengineering research is enabled by the fields of physics, chemistry, mathematics, materials science, and computer science. The Bioengineering Initiative will make surgery smarter and more precise through customization in pre-surgical planning and post-surgical evaluation; enhanced tissue/cell visualization during surgery; and minimally and noninvasive surgical methods. Current breakthroughs in biomedical imaging and the computational sciences offer significant potential to revolutionize the practice of surgery. For pediatric surgeons, these breakthroughs will offer the field of pediatric surgery unprecedented opportunities to achieve previously unimaginable levels of precision, efficiency, predictability, and clinical success. The benefit to children will be less painful procedures and more successful outcomes. 

"Surgery" Without Cutting

Immunology is a broad branch of biomedical science that studies the complex group of organs and cells that defend the body against infections and other diseases. The Immunology Initiative will use a child’s own immune response to prevent and cure disease, and pursue novel therapies to help the body heal itself and keep inflammatory disease at bay. The benefit to children will be improved healing and less need for invasive and caustic treatments such as those currently used for diagnoses of cancer and other devastating diseases. One day there could be a vaccine for cancer and other deadly diseases.

Systems Biology: The 21st Century Science

Multidisciplinary teams of biologists, mathematicians, physicists, and engineers will represent and computer-simulate a physiological system at more than one level of biological activity, enabling the modeling of an organism’s functions at a level of complexity unimaginable only a decade ago. Once a genetic code is read and understood, it is only a matter of time before it can be modified, even rewritten. The Systems Biology Initiative will provide the biomedical research framework for each of the initiatives, ensuring that advances in genomics and bioinformatics are fully leveraged. The benefits to children will be customized treatment with better outcomes.