Dr. Chani Traube , the Gerald M. Loughlin, MD Professor of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been awarded a $3.
4 million grant, with the possibility of extending to a total of $17 million over five years, from the National Institutes of Health for a large-scale clinical trial called Optimizing Pain Treatment in Children on Mechanical ventilation (OPTICOM). OPTICOM, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, is part of the NIH’s HEAL KIDS PAIN initiative. The OPTICOM study will enroll 644 children in 14 pediatric intensive care units across the United States that are part of the institute’s Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network.
This randomized clinical trial is designed to determine if adding acetaminophen or ketorolac, together or separately, to opioid-based pain control reduces pain in children with acute respiratory failure. Traube’s co-principal investigators on the project are Dr. Michael Bell, chief of critical care medicine at Children’s National Medical Center, and Richard Holubkov, chief biostatistician for the Data Coordinating Center at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
“Critical care research often requires large-scale, multisite studies, but pediatric research funding is hard to come by,” said Traube, who is also a pediatric critical care medicine specialist at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital. “The HEAL KIDS PAIN Initiative will help us overcome.
