Milestones

 

1869	Boston Children’s Hospital opens as a 20-bed facility at 9 Rutland Street in Boston’s South End.
1891	Children’s establishes the nation’s first laboratory for the modification and production of bacteria-free milk.
1920	Dr. William Ladd devises procedures for correcting various congenital defects such as intestinal malformations, launching the specialty of pediatric surgery.
1922	Dr. James Gamble analyzes the composition of body fluids and develops a method for intravenous feeding that saves the lives of thousands of infants at risk of dehydration from diarrhea.
1932	Dr. Louis Diamond characterizes Rh disease, in which a fetus’s blood is incompatible with its mother’s. Diamond later develops exchange transfusion to treat the disease.
1938	Dr. Robert Gross performs the world’s first successful surgical procedure to correct a congenital cardiovascular defect, ushering in the era of modern pediatric cardiac surgery.
1947	Dr. Sidney Farber achieves the world’s first successful remission of acute leukemia. He goes on to found the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
1954	Dr. John Enders and his colleagues win the Nobel Prize for successfully culturing the polio virus in 1949, making possible the development of the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Enders and his team went on to culture the measles virus.
1971	Dr. Judah Folkman publishes “Tumor angiogenesis: therapeutic implications” in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is the first paper to describe Folkman’s theory that tumors recruit new blood vessels in order to grow.
1978	Dr. Stuart Orkin develops restriction endonuclease mapping to diagnose thalassemia in utero.  A similar technique led to the development of prenatal tests for sickle cell anemia in 1982.
1983	Children’s physicians report the first surgical correction of hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a defect in which an infant is born without a left ventricle. The procedure is the first to correct what previously had been a fatal condition.
1985	The Howard Hughes Medical Institute funds a major research program in molecular genetics, the first HHMI program at a pediatric hospital.
1986	Children’s surgeons perform the hospital’s first heart transplant.
1986	Drs. Louis Kunkel and Stuart Orkin and their research teams develop the technique of positional cloning to identify the genes responsible for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and chronic granulomatous disease, respectively.
1989	Researchers in Neurology and Genetics discover that beta amyloid, a protein that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, is toxic to neurons, indicating the possible cause of the degenerative disease.
1990	Dr. Joseph Murray, chief of Plastic Surgery emeritus, wins the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in organ transplantation.
1996	Boston Combined Residency Program (BCRP) formed.
1997	Endostatin, one of the most potent inhibitors of angiogenesis, is discovered by Drs. Michael O’Reilly and Judah Folkman.
1998	Dr. Anthony Atala successfully transplants laboratory-grown bladders into dogs, a major advance in the growing field of tissue engineering.
1998	Dr. Evan Snyder clones the first neural stem cells from the human central nervous system.
1999	Dr. Todd Golub first uses gene expression microarrays to differentiate cancers.
1999	The FDA approves the use of CardioSEAL, a minimally invasive device invented by Dr. James Lock that closes holes in the hearts of the most seriously ill cardiac patients.
2000	Dr. Frederick Alt finds that end-joining proteins maintain the stability of DNA, helping to prevent the chromosomal changes that precede cancer.
2001	Children’s performs the world’s first successful fetal repair of hypoplastic left heart syndrome in a 19-week-old fetus.
2002	Dr. Nader Rifai co-authors a landmark study showing that a simple and inexpensive blood test for C-reactive protein is a more powerful predictor of a person’s risk of heart attack or stroke than LDL cholesterol.
2002	Drs. Scott Pomeroy and Todd Golub use microarray gene expression profiling to identify different types of brain tumors and predict clinical outcomes.
2003	Drs. Heung Bae Kim and Tom Jaksic develop, test and successfully perform the world’s first-ever serial transverse enteroplasty (STEP) procedure, a potential lifesaving surgical procedure for patients with short bowel syndrome.
2005	Dr. Stephen Harrison and colleagues show how a key part of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) changes shape, triggering other changes that allow the AIDS virus to enter and infect cells.
2005	Dr. Raif Geha discovers a gene mutation that causes common variable Immunodeficiency (CVID) and IgA deficiency.
2006	Dr. Scott Armstrong identifies self-renewal genes that turn a normal blood cell progenitor into a leukemic stem cell.
2006	Dr. Hannah Kinney links sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) to abnormalities in the brainstem serotonin system, which regulates breathing, blood pressure, body heat and arousal.
2006	Children’s urologists successfully implant laboratory grown bladders, the first completely tissue-engineered organs to be implanted in humans, in seven children with spina bifida.
2007	Dr. Charles Nelson proves that abandoned children do much better cognitively if moved from institutions to foster care.
2007	Dr. Len Zon discovers that prostaglandin E2 greatly stimulates the growth of blood and probably other tissue stem cells.
2007	Dr. Lois Smith finds that omega-3-polyunsaturated fatty acids reduce pathological retinal angiogenesis and are a potential therapy for retinopathy of prematurity.
2007	Dr. David Ludwig demonstrates that diets rich in rapidly digested carbohydrates not only expand waistlines, but may also cause fatty liver disease.
2007	Cardiac surgeons Drs. Virna Sales and John Mayer create living, growing heart valves in an animal model using tissue engineering techniques.
2008	Dr. George Daley discovers how to reprogram human somatic cells to pleuripotent stem cells with defined transcription factors.
2008	Dr. Chris Walsh and his colleagues identify several genetic loci that cause autism.
2008	Drs Vijay Sankaran and Stuart Orkin discover that the fetal hemoglobin to adult hemoglobin switch is controlled by the BCL11A transcription factor. This solves a decades old problem in hematology and has important implications for the treatment of sickle cell disease and thalassemias.
2008	Dr. Zhi He observes that stimulation of the mTOR pathway greatly increases axon regeneration after CNS injury. Subsequently, in 2012, Dr. He describes methods for achieving robust and sustained axon regeneration.
2008	Neurobiology researchers at Children’s successfully get damaged nerves to recover and regrow in a mouse model by temporarily silencing genes that normally prevent regeneration.
2008	Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research founded.
2009	Immune Disease Institute joins Boston Children’s Hospital as the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
2009	Drs. George Daley and Richard Gregory show that the microRNA, Lin 28, plays an important role in germ cell development and cancer.
2009	Drs. Len Zon and George Daley discover that blood flow triggers development of hematopoietic stem cells.
2011	Drs. Stuart Orkin, Vijay Sankaran and their colleagues are able to correct sickle cell disease in mice by silencing BCL11A, which shows that the fetal hemoglobin switch can be reversed.
2011	Drs. Luigi Notarangelo, Sung-Yun Pai and David Williams achieve the first successful treatment of severe combined immunodeficiency by gene therapy in the US.
2012	Dr. Heung Bae Kim develops novel method to stretch arteries in vivo for repair of arterial defects.
2013	Drs. Amy Starmer, Ted Sectish and Chris Landrigan develop a patient handoff method (I-PASS) that greatly reduces medical errors and preventable adverse events
2013	Dr. Dan Bauer discovers an erythroid specific enhancer of BCL11A whose deletion raises fetal hemoglobin without affecting BCL11A in the brain and lymphocytes where it is needed. The discovery opens the door to gene editing of BCL11A as a treatment for sickle cell disease and thalassemia.
2013	Dr. Joseph Majzoub finds that MRAP2, a protein that regulates melanocortin signaling, is involved in body weight regulation in humans.
2014	Drs. Jeff Burns and Tracy Wolbrink launch OPENPediatrics, an innovative web-based digital learning platform linking physicians and nurses across the world
2014	Dr. Fernando Camargo discovers that the Hippo- signaling pathway maintains the differentiated hepatocyte state. Loss of Hippo causes hepatocytes to revert to a progenitor state.
2014	Dr. Carla Kim identifies mechanisms that drive the differentiation of lung stem cells and contribute to alveolar repair after injury.
2015	Dr. Joel Hirschhorn and others identify a large number of genes that contribute to obesity and body fat distribution.
2015	Dr. Len Zon defines the perivascular hematopoietic stem cell niche and shows that epoxyeicosatrienoic acid lipids enhance HSC engraftment.
2015	Dr. Beth Stevens wins MacArthur “Genius” Award for defining the role of microglia in synapse pruning in development and Alzheimer’s disease.
2015	Dr. Len Zon shows that reversion to a neural crest identity initiates the first cancerous cell in melanoma.
2015	Dr. Hao Wu visualizes the structure of the inflammasome, which activates innate immunity, and how it is assembled.
2016	Dr. Beth Stevens reports the important discovery that the complement pathway and microglia, which prune excess synapses during normal brain development, are inappropriately activated and cause synaptic loss early in Alzheimer’s disease.
2016	Dr. Judy Lieberman discovers a new innate pathway for intracellular killing of bacteria by gasdermin D, which binds to the bacterial membrane and forms a lethal pore.
2016	Dr. Seth Rakoff-Nahoum discovers that some gut bacteria cooperate by metabolizing nutrients for each other; likely the first of many examples of microbial symbiosis.
2017	Children’s hematology/oncology faculty member George Q. Daley becomes Dean of Harvard Medical School.
2017	Zhigang He, Larry Benowitz and Clifford Woolf, working independently, show that spinal cord regrowth can occur, raising the real possibility of clinical recovery from spinal cord injury and paralysis.
2017	David Williams, Christy Duncan and their colleagues successfully treat cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy with gene therapy.
2017	Todd Golub creates a Connectivity Map linking more than a million genes, drugs, and disease states by virtue of their common gene-expression signatures.
2018	Thomas Kirchhausen develops a new microscope that achieves remarkable high resolution, noninvasive imaging of subcellular processes in large cell volumes.
2018	Bill Pu discovers that serum response factor is a key regulator of embryonic cardiomyocyte maturation.
2019	Drs David Williams and Erica Esrick cure a patient with sickle cell disease by expressing a shRNA against BCL11A in his hematopoietic stem cells and reactivating the synthesis of hemoglobin F.
2019	Pierre Dupont develops a self-driving robotic catheter that finds its way through blood vessels and a beating heart to a leaky valve without a surgeon’s involvement.
2019	Mariella Filbin shows that individual glioblastoma tumor cells exist in four different states representing different neural cell types, which complicates therapy of this dangerous brain tumor.
2019	Vijay Sankaran develops a much more powerful method for lineage tracing of human cells using mitochondrial mutations and single cell genomics.
2019	Tim Yu successfully develops the first N of 1 therapy for a child with a rare genetic disease
2020	Scott Armstrong showed that AML can be prevented by targeted epigenetic therapy of a preleukemic state.
2020	Karl Koehler and his colleagues devised a method for generating skin with hair, nerves and glands from pleuripotent stem cells, that can reconstitute skin in vivo.
2021	David Ludwig and Cara Ebbeling-Zabilansky show that a low-carb diet outperforms a low-fat diet, debunking an old diet dogma.
2021	Basil Darras and his colleagues discover that the oral drug risdaplam improves motor function in infants with severe spinal motor atrophy.
2021	Kim Stegmaier publishes a “dependency” map of genes that pediatric cancer cells need for daily survival, which offers a new universe of potential therapeutic targets.
2021	Leslie Kean discovers that abatacept prevents graft-versus-host disease opening up many more donor match possibilities, especially for people of color.
2021	Carly Ziegler and Jose Ordovas-Montanes discover that failed nasal epithelial anti-viral immunity underlies and precedes severe COVID-19.
2021	David Breault and his colleagues discover ways to expand potentially therapeutic enteroendocrine cells from the intestinal stem cells of patients.
2022	Chris Walsh and his colleagues discover that neurons in Alzheimer’s disease accumulate mutations from oxidative damage more rapidly than neurons in normal brains.
2022	Fred Alt develops a universal antibody that neutralizes all SARS-CoV-2 variants.
2022	Judy Lieberman discovers that antibody-mediated SARS-CoV-2 uptake by monocytes and macrophages triggers inflammatory cell death that contributes to COVID-19 pathogenesis.
2022	The new Hale Family Building opens, with its state-of-the-art cardiovascular institute.
2022	Rachel Grace and her colleagues showed that Mitapivat, a first of a new class of drugs that activate impotent mutant enzymes, is effective in many patients with pyruvate kinase deficiency.
2022	Scott Snapper and colleagues developed a screening system to identify environmental factors that cause or control intestinal inflammation and potentially affect inflammatory bowel disease.
2022	Siddharth Srivastava and Ann Poduri find that about a quarter of cases of cerebral palsy can be explained by genetic variants.
2022	Amy Starmer, Ted Sectish and Chris Landrigan show that the I-PASS handoff program, which they developed, cut adverse events by almost half.
2023	Jorge Martin-Rufino and Vijay Sankaran developed a systemic, high throughput method to evaluate the impact of genetic variants on human physiology and disease using massively parallel base-editing screens.
2023	Tim Yu develops a method for the identification of individuals with genetic diseases who will benefit from a N of 1 therapy using splice-switching antisense oligonucleotides.