Germain Accelerator Program
Accelerator programs at Nationwide Children’s Hospital transform patient care, improve health equity and access to care and benefit the community. This is a designation for our integrated research and clinical care programs that have an established track record inclusive of “bench to bedside” research with plans to continue innovating clinical care and research beyond program duration.
“This recognition and funding support will further advance our most prestigious programs. A key strategic goal for Nationwide Children's is to integrate our clinical care and pioneering research to benefit our patients and children across the globe. The Accelerator Program is one more way we will expand on that important goal,” said Dennis Durbin, MD, MSCE, president, Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's.
The Germain Family generously funded three Accelerator Programs to date: the Gene Therapy Center of Excellence, the Epilepsy Surgery Program and the Comprehensive Sarcoma Program.
Opportunities to fund additional Accelerator Programs are available through our foundation.
Nationwide Children’s faculty interested in applying for funding, visit Anchor.
Currently Funded Accelerator Programs
The Comprehensive Sarcoma Program brings together a team with expertise in the diagnosis and management of bone and soft tissue sarcoma, with an emphasis on novel and innovative treatment approaches. The sarcoma team is working to fill gaps in early-phase clinical trials and streamline interactions among divisions to ensure seamless care. Through the three-year accelerator program, sarcoma team members will increase clinical and trial volumes, implement universal biology consent, launch rapid research autopsy, and boost surgical innovation via 3D printing and gait analysis.
Epilepsy affects 1 in 26 people. Currently available medications are ineffective for about a third of children with epilepsy. In those cases, curative or palliative surgery may be the only option. The Epilepsy Surgery Accelerator Program enhances the care of epilepsy patients, especially those with medically intractable epilepsy, to offer many treatment options and expands research opportunities:
- Develop a streamlined patient pathway from epilepsy diagnosis to surgery.
- Further engage in basic science and translational research for epilepsy, building on the genomic profiling protocol currently in place.
- Expand clinical research efforts to multicenter epilepsy research programs.
Through collaboration with the Institute for Genomic Medicine, the Epilepsy Surgery Accelerator Program is engaged in the pursuit of curing epilepsy for children with unrelenting seizures.
By streamlining processes, increasing efficiency for facilitating clinical trials and introducing FDA approved therapies to our patients, the Gene Therapy Center of Excellence serves to improve access to gene therapies for patients. As a clinical care and research collaboration, the Gene Therapy Center of Excellence has four key aims:
- Streamline process related to prior authorization, drug order, receipt and storage to shorten the time from commercialization to patient delivery.
- Facilitate best practices for investigational gene therapy administration, delivery and training.
- Function as a hub for intravenous gene therapy delivery, leading in biosafety and compliance, and educating patients and families.
- Connect faculty and family foundations to develop and manage partnerships for gene therapy research and clinical trials.
The Prune Belly Syndrome (PBS) Program brings together a multidisciplinary team with expertise in the care of a rare and complex genetic disorder that can lead to life-threatening complications, including kidney failure. Established in 2023, the program has experienced rapid growth and is uniquely positioned to expand through nationally recognized clinical expertise, a robust research portfolio and integration of specialized Nationwide Children’s assets, including the Institute for Genomic Medicine, Fetal Center, Gait Lab and the Center for Colorectal and Pelvic Reconstruction. Through the three-year accelerator program, the PBS team will expand medical and surgical care across fetal and pediatric populations, enhance patient and family experience and leverage clinical research to transform outcomes for children with PBS.
The Heart Center Precision Health Program brings together experts in cardiovascular medicine, genomics, data science and clinical informatics to advance precision care for children with heart disease. Building on the success of the IGM Cardiac Outcomes Research by Application of Genomics — COURAGE for Kids — translational genomics protocol, the program has already demonstrated the ability to identify known and novel genetic causes of disease and rapidly diagnose pathogenic variants in high-risk Heart Center patients.
Through the three-year accelerator program, the team will move beyond diagnosis toward prediction by integrating genomic findings with clinical, physiologic, imaging, registry and longitudinal outcome data through the Heart Center Data Lake. This governed data and analytics platform will connect currently siloed Heart Center data, support discovery and quality improvement, enable genomics-informed dashboards and predictive models and create a scalable foundation for future clinical decision-support tools.
Through the three-year accelerator program, the team will establish a learning pediatric precision cardiology platform designed to predict multi-system outcomes, personalize care, accelerate translation from discovery to the bedside and position Nationwide Children’s as a national leader in genomics-enabled pediatric cardiovascular care.