SickKids is a world leader in child health research and now, when you donate to our new Research & Learning Tower Campaign, your donations can go twice as far thanks to a generous matching program from the Government of Ontario.

Until March 31, 2012, your donation will be matched dollar for dollar, meaning you can help double the impact on the health of future generations of children. Scheduled to open in 2013, the state-of-the-art Research & Learning Tower will assemble more than 2,000 brilliant scientific minds under one roof to share ideas and make new discoveries that will help children locally, nationally and around the world.

“SickKids has a commitment to being better tomorrow than it is today,” says Ted Garrard, President and CEO of SickKids Foundation. “Research will help us keep that promise.”

Double your impact by clicking here.

(Donations over $25,000 will be matched $1 for every $2.)

A team of our SickKids scientists submitted a proposal for an international grant competition, Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development. This competition is seeking innovative approaches for improving maternal and neonatal survival in rural regions of low-income countries. The team from SickKids are now finalists in the competition and are also up for a People’s Choice Award for the best submission to the challenge – and YOU can help them win the People’s Choice Award!

Seventy-seven finalists out of more than 600 applications have been selected to compete in the final stage of this program. Team SickKids is made up of Drs. Daniel Roth, Stan Zlotkin, Ashley Aimone and Diego Bassani of SickKids and collaborators from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baylor College of Medicine, and ICDDR,B (Bangladesh).

The project entitled, Prenatal calcium to prevent preeclampsia and preterm birth in resource-poor rural settings, is particularly innovative because they are suggesting that calcium and iron can be safely and feasibly provided together for the first time. The team proposes to develop a novel once-daily microencapsulated micronutrient powder containing iron, folic acid, and calcium (Prenatal Sprinkles) to overcome barriers to the integration of calcium into prenatal care in developing countries. If successful, their innovation – “differential time-release microencapsulation” – will mask the taste of iron and the gritty tongue-feel of calcium, and facilitate differential iron and calcium absorption.

Should the SickKids team be successful in being awarded this grant, they anticipate that Prenatal Sprinkles will be an effective means to supply supplemental calcium (and iron-folic acid) to pregnant women in rural settings, without causing adverse effects on iron absorption.

While there is still a huge process the team has to go through to receive this grant, you can help by registering and voting for them in the People’s Choice Award. This will be presented at the Saving Lives at Birth DevelopmentXChange July 27-28, 2011 in Washington, DC. 

Register an account today, and vote for your colleagues. Voting is open now until July 27 at 5 p.m.  Visit the Saving Lives at Birth website, register and vote!

MacKenzie, 10, recently asked our SickKids scientists a question about her career goals:

Q: I am ten years old and I want to become a cancer researcher when I am old enough. How do you go about doing this?

Here is the answer from SickKids Senior Scientist and Staff Oncologist Dr. David Malkin.

A: “Being a cancer researcher is an amazing job!  To become a cancer researcher, you first have to finish high school and then four years of university, where you are probably going to want to study subjects such as biology (studying living things), chemistry (studying how chemicals are created and work), and genetics (how genes work to make us who we are). You would then do at least another four years in University, earning a degree called a Master's or Doctorate in cancer research. During these years, you would work with a team of scientists who are doing cancer research, while doing your own cancer research project. After that, you probably would spend another couple of years with another cancer research group to learn even more. Some people want to combine a career being a cancer research and a doctor who takes care of cancer patients. If you wanted to do that, then at some point in all that training, you would spend 4 years in medical school and do several years of training to be a cancer specialist. After that, you are finally ready to start your own career as a cancer researcher, and all that extra schooling is well worth it!”

Have you ever had a burning question about your body or about your health and didn’t know how to find the answer? This might just be the opportunity to get to the bottom of it!

You have the chance to submit your question and it will be answered by a scientist at SickKids who specializes in that area. The best questions and answers will be featured on the Research Institute website.

Check the website often to see if your question gets posted. You can learn about what others want to know and if you read enough answers, you may even become a health expert yourself!