Dr. Bollard shared how Children’s National is focused on sustainability and growth, the biggest opportunities in translating research breakthroughs into clinical applications, and the future of pediatric cancer and immunology research.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: In your role, what are your top research priorities for Children’s National, and how do you plan to advance innovation in pediatric cancer and immunology?
Dr. Catherine Bollard: My biggest top-of-mind is sustainability and growth. When I’m talking about sustainability, I’m really talking about our research talent — faculty, but also, our next generation of research leaders, whether they be our grad students, our postdocs, our staff scientists, as well as our junior faculty. How do we best set up an environment that allows them to grow and flourish within the Children’s National Research Institute? That’s top of mind for me.
And within that, we need to make sure we have the right infrastructure in place. We need to make sure we are attracting the right financial stability, and understanding that financial stability comes from not only grant funding sources, like the National Institutes of Health, but other funding sources, including philanthropy as well. We’re trying to go after all areas of funding streams to set us up for success and growth.
I also want to bring in the innovation piece — that’s extremely important in this process of growth and sustainability. Without innovation that will eventually drive to commercialization, things can just get stuck in academia. And so that is also a big top-of-mind priority.
Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities in translating research breakthroughs into clinical applications, particularly in pediatric care?
CB: One of the biggest challenges is certainly uncertainties with [National Institutes of Health] funding. However, I do see there are opportunities in the commercial sector and partnering with industry that could really help fast-track our discoveries at the bench to the clinic and commercialization.
While we may have difficulties with the NIH funding stream, there may also be opportunities in the industry sector. And so we’re trying to look at opportunities that don’t make us overly reliant on purely NIH or government funding. A lot of pediatric institutions are looking at how to diversify portfolios.
One of the biggest challenges we have as a pediatric research institution is that, often by definition, the discoveries we’re making — especially with respect to new therapeutics — are probably serving a “rare disease” population, which doesn’t always fit the pharma model as you want to move forward there. And that is where we’ve been partnering more with foundations and doubling down on our philanthropic efforts. As the new CEO keeps saying: while pediatric diseases may not make up a large percentage of the overall disease burden in our community, children are 100% of our future. If we invest in pediatric research today, it will have a huge impact tomorrow, and we should not lose sight of that.
Q: Children’s National is a leader in pediatric research. How do you plan to foster collaboration between researchers, clinicians and industry partners to accelerate discoveries?
CB: We’re undergoing a strategic plan at the hospital, and research, education and innovation are all part of the same pillar because we all have to be closely aligned together. And so right now, that’s a big top-of-mind priority — to bolster our innovation pillar within Children’s National and diversify it. We’ve been very strong with medical devices, for example, and we also want to strengthen the novel therapies being developed here. And partnering with companies that might want to take that space further forward, compared to maybe just focusing on devices. It’s more about leveraging our current strengths in the device setting and expanding on them for our drug development and novel therapeutic initiatives.
Q: Looking ahead, what scientific advancements or emerging technologies excite you the most in the fields of cancer and immunology, and how do you see them shaping pediatric healthcare in the next five to 10 years?
CB: Certainly, I’m biased because I’ve been in the cell and gene therapy space for a quarter of a century. And I do think cell and gene therapy is a space that is expanding quickly. For cancer immunotherapy and cell therapy, I think what we’ll start seeing is the successes we’ve seen for blood cancers will be expanded to solid tumors.
But what is happening right now is that multiple academic and commercial entities are exploring these cell therapy platforms for autoimmune diseases. Expanding from cancer treatment to autoimmune diseases would significantly increase the potential patient population, even in the pediatric setting. This shift presents a particularly exciting area to watch.
In the gene therapy space, with the most recent commercial products in my field of interest — sickle cell disease and thalassemia — these are just the tip of the iceberg. I believe we will see more gene therapies reaching commercialization, which will have a far-reaching impact, especially on the pediatric population. Ideally, these children will be cured at a very young age.
Here you have a pediatric population that has historically suffered from high morbidity and early mortality, now with the potential to be cured early and live full lives without the burden of constant hospital care. That will truly be transformative and could open the floodgates for more therapies designed to correct genetic diseases through this novel approach.