Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia Program | Research & Innovation

National collaborations

Boston Children's is a member institution of several national collaboratives focused on improving the health of premature infants with severe lung disease, including the BPD Collaborative and the Children’s Hospitals Neonatal Consortium. The BPD Collaborative is an international consortium of institutions with expertise in caring for infants with the most severe forms of bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). The group’s mission is to improve knowledge of how to best care for these children and improve their long-term outcomes.

Our team is actively involved in this collaborative; selected projects include:

• Identifying which babies may require tracheostomy earlier
• Determining optimal ventilation strategies for severe BPD
• Strategies on how to provide optimal nutrition to babies with BPD
• Understanding racial and ethnic disparities in BPD care and outcomes
• Optimizing long-term outcomes for children with BPD

Stem cell factors may prevent chronic lung disease

Premature babies often require supplemental oxygen and need to be placed on ventilators, but these life-saving machines can sometimes damage their delicate lungs, resulting in chronic lung disease of infancy or BPD.

Historically, researchers and clinicians have had limited success in preventing BPD in premature babies. But research from our Division of Newborn Medicine may help change that. Investigators have found that stem cells taken from bone marrow or from the umbilical cord and injected into the blood provided partial protection: The treatment helped better maintain the lungs’ blood vessels and reduce inflammation.

Investigators also found that the fluid in which the cells were grown was able to protect the lungs better than the stem cells themselves. A research team led by Stella Kourembanas, MD, and S. Alex Mitsialis, PhD, found that small but complex particles (extracellular vesicles or sEV) secreted by the stem cells and isolated from this fluid protect from oxygen- or ventilator-induced lung injury in pre-clinical test subjects and could become a future treatment to prevent premature babies from developing chronic lung disease.

In the future, Dr. Kourembanas, working with clinical and research colleagues at Boston Children’s and other institutions, plans to start a multicenter clinical trial and test vesicles derived from these stem cells to treat premature babies with BPD and its associated complications.

Learn about Dr. Kourembanas’ research.

Ongoing research

We are also conducting several clinical studies, including:

• Establishing a multidisciplinary team caring for infants with BPD
• Safety of sildenafil in premature infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia
• Effect of platelet transfusion on chronic lung disease, led by Patricia Davenport, MD
• Efficacy of jejunal feeding in premature infants with evolving or established bronchopulmonary dysplasia, led by Jonathan Levin, MD, MBI, and Kristen Leeman, MD
• Preterm Lung Registry, which tracks long-term outcomes for children with BPD, led by Lystra Hayden, MD, MMSc
  • Lung function trajectories in children with post-prematurity respiratory disease: identifying risk factors for abnormal growth
  • Long-term respiratory and developmental outcomes in children with bronchopulmonary dysplasia and history of tracheostomy
• High Altitude Simulation Testing for infants with BPD
• Aero-BPD, a study looking at the impact of indoor air quality on outcomes in school-aged children with BPD, led by Jonathan Gaffin, MD, MMsc
• Diagnosis and management of pulmonary hypertension in BPD
• Pulmonary vein stenosis as a complication in premature infants with severe BPD
  • Prematurity and Pulmonary Vein Stenosis: The Role of Parenchymal Lung Disease and Pulmonary Vascular Disease: PubMed
  • Primary Pulmonary Vein Stenosis: A New Look at a Rare but Challenging Disease: PubMed