The Beads of Courage Program provides innovative arts-in-medicine programs for children coping with serious illness, their families, and the clinicians who care for them.

The project will integrate diverse datasets and advanced quantitative approaches to better define the natural history of cardiomyopathy in Duchenne, identify key biomarkers, and support the development of tools to optimize the design and conduct of clinical trials for candidate drugs.

The success of the half-day interaction on Fridays led the Sunrise Association to pilot a six-day camp environment for the clinic. The hope is that it will be shared with other pediatric hospitals offering cancer therapies.

Vanderbilt Health was the first to use this technology in Tennessee in 1989, with the first patient placed on ECMO in the neonatal intensive care unit. The pediatric program is one of the largest and most successful programs in the world.

Squid, a facility dog at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, helped relieve Porter Pickett’s anxiety throughout cancer treatment.

The third-year pediatric resident was recognized for her commitment to the Vanderbilt Health Credo.