Extended parea member helps change Mass. law

Last week, Gov. Patrick signed a law designed to “advance new clinical investigation into devastating congenital conditions and diseases that threaten the lives of newborns and put children’s quality of life at risk”. This “Act to Promote Biomedical Research” is the materialization of years of lobbying by the Academic Pediatrics community of Massachusetts.

The lobbying efforts of the major beneficiary of the Act’s Provisions, i.e. Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB), had been spearheaded by our own Stella. The signing of the Law represents the fulfillment of years of hard work on her part. She represented the Massachusetts Medical Community in a closed-to-the-public signing ceremony at the State House.

An CHB Public Relations release said the Act is "important to all of us who care deeply about the health and wellbeing of children" and "will help advance new clinical investigation into devastating congenital conditions and diseases that threaten the lives of newborns and put children’s quality of life at risk."

The "bill provides the safeguards for these studies to take place and will allow babies to benefit from burgeoning biomedical knowledge and clinical advances, as older children and adults now do," the release said.

"A broad coalition of physicians, researchers, and nurses put a tremendous amount of effort into this bill because we knew how important this work can and will be to children all across the world," the hospital said.

Dr. Stella Kourembanas (above, second from left), CHB's Clement A. Smith Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School was present in her capacities as Chief of the Division of Newborn Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston and Chair of the Academic Program in Neonatology at Children's Hospital Boston, Brigham & Women's Hospital & Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.