WHY THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT MATTERS IN RESEARCH.

• Author: Kennedy, Mary Jayne

Four million babies are born every year in the United States, and nearly 400,000 are born prematurely.

These premature infants need special care and medicine to survive, such as antibiotics to treat life-threatening infections they acquire at birth.

However, the most common antibiotics used to treat infections in newborns can damage kidney cells and prevent them from developing normally. As a result, the kidneys migh not work as well and the baby may have reduced kidney function that can last a lifetime.

That leaves 400,000 families every year making this heartwrenching decision: Do I give my child a medication that will save their life but potentially damage their kidneys, causing lifelong complications?

As a pediatric clinical pharmacist, this is something I experienced daily in the neonatal intensive care unit. This motivated me to find a solution so that no parent would ever have to make that decision again.

If I could figure out which babies were susceptible to kidney damage before they were given treatment, I could possibly prevent the injury. Then I could safely treat the baby with the medication needed to save their life.

My research team considered all the biomedical advances over the last few decades. Surely there was some sort of technology that could help us. And there was. The only problem was that those technologies required something we didn't have--blood. The average premature baby only has 100 milliliters of blood circulating throughout their entire body. That's the amount of a travel size liquid you're allowed to pack on an airplane.

So, we got creative. We asked ourselves, "Is there something that might give us the same information as a blood sample, but is more accessible and easier to obtain?"

That's when things got interesting.

The average premature newborn uses about 10 diapers a day, and those diapers contain a lot of urine. To most people, used diapers are simply garbage or waste. But to us, those diapers represented possibility--an opportunity to collect data and answer questions.

Urine is made by the kidney, and the kidney is what we were interested in. On the surface, it made sense. But no one had ever used urine from a premature baby's diaper for this type of research.

Our research team had to make a decision. Were we willing to challenge the industry standard of using blood samples? Were we willing to take a risk and invest our time, money and energy into a project that might fail?

Were we willing to be true...