HI Center Gains Status as CHOP Frontier Program

The Congenital Hyperinsulinism Center is poised to help even more children and families after it was selected as a Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Frontier Program.

This designation means it will receive three years of specialized support needed to forge important new discoveries, create novel therapies and deliver hope to more families.

The HI Center is already the world’s leading HI center, treating more children with HI than any other. As a Frontier Program, we will have the resources to further innovate by using personalized medicine to treat patients with the condition.

We plan to build a multidimensional patient data collection platform, develop more accurate diagnostic tools for insulinomas and accelerate late-stage clinical trials for a promising CHOP-patented compound that ameliorates HI.

“We’ve had a long history of discovering new ways to help children with HI,” says center director Diva D. De León-Crutchlow, MD, MSCE. “Dr. Charles Stanley, the center’s founder, was on the forefront of uncovering the genetics of HI. Back in 2004, the center developed the 18F-DOPA PET scan, enabling us to identify the location of focal lesions and drastically improving the treatment of children with focal disease. We’re just as excited about the innovations to come.”