The Big Questions: A/Prof Long & Prof Babl
Novel approaches to complex problems: toward adaptive platform trials in paediatric sepsis
A/Prof Elliot Long and Professor Franz Babl
Sepsis is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in children worldwide. Yet the clinical trial evidence for paediatric sepsis care is surprisingly limited. Using our experience with the largest sepsis randomised trial in children conducted to date we address the rationale for transitioning from traditional randomised trials to adaptive platform trials for future sepsis research.
Associate Professor Elliot Long is a Consultant Paediatric Emergency Physician at The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Care at the University of Melbourne, and Sepsis Team Leader at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. His research focuses on improving outcomes for children with sepsis through international collaborative research, adaptive clinical trial design, and implementation science. Over the past decade, Elliot has led a program of research spanning sepsis recognition, resuscitation, and emergency care, with a particular interest in fluid therapy and haemodynamic support. He has led the multicentre SENTINEL and SENTINEL International studies, which have characterised the epidemiology and management of paediatric sepsis across high- and low-resource settings, and co-leads the international James Lind Alliance Paediatric Sepsis Priority Setting Partnership to identify the highest priorities for future research. Elliot is Chief Investigator of the PASSPORT (Paediatric Adaptive Sepsis Platform Trial), an international adaptive platform trial designed to accelerate the evaluation of treatments for children with sepsis. He has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications, has secured over $20 million in competitive research funding, and is committed to building global research partnerships that translate evidence into improved care for children with sepsis worldwide.
Professor Franz Babl is the Professor of Paediatric Emergency Medicine at the University of Melbourne and a paediatric emergency physician at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne Australia. He is the head of emergency research at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Australia. His research focus is on pragmatic clinical research questions affecting children across emergency departments and other acute care settings. He conducts most research in multi-centre randomized controlled trials and large observational studies via PREDICT, the paediatric emergency research network in Australia and New Zealand, and PERN, a global collaboration of emergency research networks. He has sourced >$80 million in grant funding and published >450 peer-reviewed papers.