Save the Date!   February 8, 2025

In 2021 The Focus on Kids Guild raised over $28,000 through our online "Beakers and Bubbly" event. Thank you to everyone that participated!

Our fundraising focus was the Genome Now Initiative. Seattle Children's Department of Laboratories is partnering closely with Seattle Children's Foundation (The Guild Office), Amazon Web Services, The Brotman Baty Institute, UW Department of Laboratory Medicine and many others to raise funds to support the development of for Long-read sequencing. Our goal is to offer Long-read sequencing in our clinical laboratory. 

In 2020 The Focus on Kids Guild raised over $60,000 through our online "Beakers and Bubbly" event. Thank you to everyone that participated!

Our fundraising contributed to an established fund that focuses on developing laboratory testing policies for insurance companies, for a number of tests for inherited diseases, cancer, and infectious diseases.  By creating laboratory testing policies for insurance companies, we can prevent families from unnecessary financial burden and help them resume the stable life they had before their child’s illness. This fund has supported a number of successes including the creation of a medical necessity policy for medical exomes that now covers 13 million previously uncovered lives, and policies for mitochondrial disease testing that now cover 19 million lives. In addition, a toolkit for families, “Complex Lab Tests: How to Get Them Covered”, was created for our patients. 

In 2019 The Focus on Kids Guild raised over $85,000 at our"Beakers and Bubbly" event. Thank you to everyone that participated!

With the funding raised, our Department of Laboratories supported these ground-breaking projects:

• Our Laboratory collaborated with Cardiology, Critical Care, Cardiac Surgery and Pharmacy, and started a patient study to decrease bleeding and clotting for our ECMO patients.  We aided the ECMO group in developing a protocol for heparin monitoring to reduce blood draws and ACT measurements by 50%.

• Seattle Children’s Molecular Genetics Laboratory partnered with the Division of Hematology Oncology and developed a Leukemia Profiling Assay that went live on April 1, 2019.

• Seattle Children’s Laboratory funded a UW Chemistry Fellow, Dr. Liao, who is developing specialized tests to support the Washington State Newborn Screening Program.