General and Thoracic Surgery

Faculty Labs

The Cincinnati Fetal Care Center is a comprehensive fetal and maternal therapeutic center created as a collaborative joint project between Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Good Samaritan Hospital and University of Cincinnati Medical Center. The Fetal Care Center has its business and academic home in the Division of General Pediatric and Thoracic Surgery at Cincinnati Children's. Since 2011, there has been an intentional move toward greater integration with the Perinatal Institute with the realization that the Fetal Care Center offers the opportunity for Neonatology to develop best practices in the management of fetuses undergoing fetal therapy and the Perinatal Institute offers collaboration and integration with partner institutions as well as extensive research experience and infrastructure.

• The Habli Lab of Fetal growth and Developmental Origins of Adult Disease has a mission to deliver healthier babies, free of adult diseases.
• The Lim Lab is focused on the innovation of prenatal diagnosis and in utero treatment

The Center for Fetal and Placental Research (CFPR) is a robust research consortium of labs within the Division of Pediatric General, Thoracic and Fetal Surgery sharing a mutual interest in the use of cellular and molecular techniques to study fetal and placental biology for the treatment of congenital disease.

• The Jones Lab is focused on investigating functional aspects of the placenta and its involvement in pregnancy pathologies such as intra-uterine growth restriction (IUGR).
• The Peiro Lab is dedicated to investigating basic physiopathologic mechanisms of pediatric and fetal surgical congenital malformations, all to discover solutions or therapeutic strategies for unresolved problems in the treatment of these anomalies.

Part of the Intestinal Care Center at Children’s Hospital, the Intestinal Rehabilitation Program works to understand the process of intestinal disease that leads to failure. This program collaborates closely with the Department of Surgery, Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition and Division of Neonatology at Cincinnati Children’s in active clinical trials, as well as basic and translational research.

• The Helmrath Lab focused on identifying putative factors that augment the expansion of intestinal stem cells following resection. Our recently developed human model of small intestine using pluripotent stem cells (Nature Medicine 2014; 20(11): 1310-4 (featured on the cover)) provides an additional valuable institutional resource to address personalized approached to human intestinal diseases and short bowel syndrome and likely will greatly expand our role as collaborators at Cincinnati Children's.

Liver cancer is the fifth most common cancer and the third most common cause of cancer-related death in the world. The development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) occurs during long time affecting mainly adult people. Hepatoblastoma (HBL) is the pediatric liver disease which affects children at very early ages.

• The Timchenko Lab in collaboration with the Liver Tumor Program (LTP) has set out to elucidate molecular mechanisms of HCC and HBL and to identify drugs which will cure liver cancer.
• The Shin Lab works to decipher the molecular basis underlying liver cancer, with a focus on adult hepatic progenitor cells and fetal hepatoblasts.

The Surgical Weight Loss Program for Teens within the Division of Pediatric Surgery provides outstanding pediatric bariatric surgical care to the local and national community. This first-in-class clinical program was developed in parallel with a specialized research arm, the Center for Bariatric Research and Innovation (CBRI).  

The long range goal of the CBRI is to detail the outcomes, both positive and negative, of bariatric surgery in youth over multiple decades including multigenerational effects of treatment. These goals are being accomplished by several individual projects, with funding primarily from NIH. 

• The Bariatrics Research Lab is concentrating on new, scientifically critical research questions in the field of pediatric obesity and bariatric outcomes, while leading the national effort to examine long-term outcomes of bariatric surgery.

Because liver tumors have become a more frequent indication for liver transplantation, the abdominal transplant team has developed a new collaborative program with the Cancer Blood and Disease Institute - the liver tumor program - which recently recruited a senior investigator to the Pediatric Surgery Division, jointly supported by the Cancer Blood and Disease Institute and pediatric surgery studying tumor biology. We are the lead investigators responsible for the development of the next Children’s Oncology Group (COG) supported liver tumor trial - the Pediatric Hepatic International Tumor Trial (PHITT), an international study to be conducted at over 300 centers around the world.

• The Tiao Lab focuses on the molecular mechanism of Biliary Atresia, a devastating inflammatory cholangiopathy, leading to obstruction of the biliary tree and without treatment, death within two years of birth. It is the most common cause of pediatric end stage liver disease and remains the number one indication for pediatric liver transplantation in the United States.

The Trauma program at Cincinnati Children's was originally verified by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma in 1993 and has been successfully re-verified every three years since then as a Level 1 Pediatric Trauma Center. The program focuses on the entire spectrum of pediatric injury, from prevention through care and ultimate recovery. Trauma Services within the Division of Pediatric Surgery is responsible for trauma related education, care, research, injury prevention and quality improvement. 

• Trauma Research