Research Initiatives

STAR’s Research Initiatives

The overarching goal of our research is to develop safer and more readily accessible approaches to curing sickle cell disease. Presently we focus primarily on bone marrow transplantation (BMT), but are expanding that focus to include gene therapy. We conduct clinical trials to assess innovative treatment strategies as well as what are referred to as observational or non-treatment clinical studies. We perform observational studies to learn more about the BMT process in children and adolescents with sickle cell disease-for example, how cognitive development progresses following BMT in children who had strokes before BMT.