Zaidee’s Kick Up Your Stand For Kids Research is a national event that you can choose which day you wish to ride either on the Saturday 3rd October or Sunday 4th October 2020. Just $10 a ticket or you can donate more if you wish. You can ride alone or you can arrange a group or club ride to support this day. There is no set location for this ride to start or end, that is up to you. The ride can start as soon as you ride out your driveway and then ends when you ride back in.

An event to raise much need funds for Kids Research.

Supporting Murdoch Children's Research Institute Cardiac Regeneration Lab

Heart disease is the leading cause of death and disability in children, affecting up to 1 in 100 live births. Complex forms of childhood heart disease (CHD) often require multiple surgical interventions during early childhood and adolescence. Surgical advances over the past 20 years have dramatically increased survival rates, with more than 85% of children living into adulthood. As a result, CHD is now considered a life-long disease and guidelines and registries have been developed to facilitate the continuum of life-long care.

An emerging and alarming trend however is the sharp rise in the number of children with CHD hospitalised due to heart failure, a condition that can only be resolved by heart transplantation. There is a growing gap between the number of donors and the number of children with heart failure in need of transplantation. Current treatment options are clearly inadequate and new approaches to radically change patient trajectories are imperative.

MCRI’s Cardiac Regeneration Lab, lead by Associate Professor Enzo Porrello, are world leaders in generating models of the heart from patient stem cells. By recreating human heart tissue from stem cells, we are now able to ‘model’ the human organ in the laboratory. As these stem cells can be made from patients, it is now possible to precisely investigate the cause of childhood heart disease in each specific patient. The hope is to use these mini-hearts to better understand heart development and diseases, to test drugs for results and toxicity to find treatments for CHD, and eventually to bioengineer heart tissues for transplantation during surgery.

MCRI’s Cardiac Regeneration lab requires funding for a range of consumables to conduct it’s important experimental work, this includes molecular genetic studies right through to functional genomic studies using human patient stem cells.