St. Jude

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Children are the future of the world; they bring happiness to everyone. Life is easier and more enjoyable when children are around. Children’s laughter has the power to change lives; fortunately, they need organizations to keep them laughing. Nowadays, there are many organizations all around the world which help children in all aspects. One of theseorganizations is St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which is a nonprofit organization. Their main office is located in Memphis, Tennessee. The reason why St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was built was because of the great faith Danny Thomas, who was one of nine children to immigrant parents, had in St. Jude Thaddeus. Thomas wanted St. Jude’s shrine to be a hospital where catastrophically illchildren could find treatment, regardless of their race, religion, or ability to pay. He also had the premise that “No child should die in the dawn of life” (St. Jude).
St. Jude opened its doors in 1962, and with time, it became an international resource for the study and treatment of pediatric illnesses including cancer, AIDS, sickle cell disease, and inherited immune disorders. Before St. Judeopened, less than 4 percent of children with the most common pediatric illnesses survived, and now thanks to the treatments developed at St. Jude Hospital, more than 90 percent of children survive those illnesses. During its first years, St. Jude made very important discoveries. In 1965, St. Jude was the first organization which developed the first immunologic method to diagnose solid tumors inchildren. Also, from 1968 to 1977, researchers and doctors from St. Jude developed many programs in order to help more children with cancer. In 1977, treatment developments proved to be effective in 55 percent of children with neuroblastoma, which is the second most common solid tumor in children.
During the 90’s, St. Jude made very important contributions to the medical field with numerousdiscoveries made by its researchers and scientists. St. Jude became the first hospital in the world to perform gene therapy on a pediatric brain tumor patient. According to Wikipedia, “Gene therapy is the insertion of genes into an individual’s cell and biological tissues to treat disease, such as cancer where deleterious mutant alleles are replace with functional ones” (1). In 1996, St. Jude openedvector production labs, which made it one of the few centers in the world with a comprehensive cell and gene therapy program. This was really helpful to the hospital because all materials needed to deliver gene therapy, are manufactured on site at St. Jude Hospital. Another accomplishment of St. Jude was in 1996, when they made the first ever bone marrow transplant to treat the rare bone diseaseosteogenesis imperfect. In 1996, Peter Doherty, Ph. D., chairman of the immunology department of St. Jude, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his key discoveries on the response of the immune system to an infection. These findings opened the door to a new understanding of organ rejection after a transplant, a better comprehension about genetic susceptibility to disease, and new approaches tovaccines. By 1998, the survival rate in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is the most common form of childhood cancer, had increase from 73 percent to 80 percent.
By the year 2000, St. Jude researchers discovered a cellular vehicle that transports the bacterium streptococcus pneumonia from the throat to the stream. Bacterial protein, which St. Jude is developing as a potentialvaccine candidate to block pneumococcal invasion, since pneumonia kills 3.7 million children each year and is the most deadly childhood disease worldwide. During the same year, researchers of St. Jude developed new methods that appear to remove certain gene transfer barriers in blood diseases. The results hold a great promise for blood diseases. In 2001, St. Jude researchers and scientists...