The Center for Rare Childhood Disorders at TGen is a state-of-the-art organization that uses genetic research to help parents who are coping with a child who has a rare childhood disorder.This webinar will discuss the world of rare childhood disorders and how TGen uses its bench to bedside approach to help those in their clinic.

BIO: Keri Ramsey, BSN, RN is Clinical Co-Director of the Center for Rare Childhood Disorders(C4RCD) at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). The goal of the Center is to use the latest advances in genetic sequencing to identify or provide insight into the cause of unexplained rare childhood disorders.Keri originally started working at TGen in 2003 as Lead Technologist and Center Coordinator for the NINDS/NIMH Microarray Consortium. The Consortium supported gene expression profiling of the nervous system through the application of microarray technologies and provided reagents, services, and training to the neuroscience community, on a fee-for-service basis.In 2007 she left TGen and obtained her nursing degree at Arizona State University. She spent four years working as a Certified Critical Care Nurse in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit at BannerGood Samaritan.

Keri returned to TGen in 2013 as a clinical research coordinator at the C4RCD. In her current role as Clinical Co-Director, Keri manages several research studies. The largest of these studies use next-generation sequencing to diagnose rare childhood disorders. She is the lead coordinator for a pharmaceutical clinical trial in Rett syndrome, hoping to improve patients’ quality of life. She has also worked on studies of tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC); one assessed the efficacy of an mTOR inhibitor drug on seizure frequency and the other looked at genetic modifiers of disease. Keri screens patients for enrollment, consents families, and obtains tissue specimens. She updates families on their progress in the study and assists in returning research results.