A new CHOP Neuroscience Center is opening!

We are excited to announce the official launch of the Neuroscience Center, which brings together the Divisions of Neurology and Neurosurgery in an innovative clinical care, education and research partnership. This partnership between Neurology and Neurosurgery will expand upon efforts by related divisions at CHOP to develop novel diagnostics in key clinical areas. The novel diagnostics will generate specimens and data that can subsequently be used to fuel translational research, personalized diagnoses and therapies, improved clinical outcomes, and continued diagnostics innovation.

Research is central to everything the Neuroscience Center team does. The center will provide the opportunity for a continuous cycle of learning shared across CHOP labs, clinics, the hospital and into the broader teams with whom we collaborate. This will improve our ability to serve patients' needs, enable us to provide highly innovative and individualized treatment, and accelerate our pace toward cutting-edge breakthrough discoveries such as biomarker discovery, tissue genomics, outcomes research, cell and gene therapies for neurological diseases, clinical trials and neuroimaging research partnerships.

The Neuroscience Center will work closely in complementing ongoing research initiatives across the Divisions of Neurology and Neurosurgery. A close partner in taking a leading role in the center's discovery initiatives is the Center for Data Driven Discoveries in Biomedical Research (D3b). Led by Drs. Phillp Jay Storm, Dr. Adam Resnik, and Jena Lilly. D3b already touts impressive resources such as Cavatica, a cloud-based platform for collaboratively accessing, sharing, and analyzing pediatric cancer data as well as multiple high-impact collaborations, including the Children's Brain Tumor Network and the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center. D3b provides the scientific expertise and diverse research platforms to help accelerate the Neuroscience Center's capabilities to launch new research projects and collaborations.

The Neuroscience Center will also complement two highly specialized and ground-breaking Frontier programs: the Epilepsy Neurogenetics Initiative (ENGIN), led by Drs. Ethan Goldberg, Ingo Helbig and Mark Fitzgerald, and The Biomedical Optical Devices to Monitor Cerebral Health (Neuro-Optics) program, led by Drs. Dan Licht, Todd Kilbaugh and Wesley Baker. These Frontier programs provide unique opportunities for patients within the Neuroscience center to gain access to clinical treatments based on cutting-edge research and the expertise of the care teams.

The Neuroscience Center will include a center-focused biorepository (The Neuroscience Center Biorepository) that encompasses a key priority to provide the ability for all patients seen within the center to participate in a biobanking research project. The samples and data collected under this project will become a comprehensive collection of carefully stewarded samples and linked patient data under that will be broadly available for future explorations and research discovery questions.

Unified by a shared mission and vision, the Neuroscience Center will help us deliver the best, most comprehensive care for our patients with acute or chronic neurological or neurosurgical conditions and will elevate CHOP as the national resource for clinical neuroscience discovery.