With Memorial Day behind us, summer is in sight!
And of course, Team Hydro is hitting the water with a full schedule of events aimed at finding a cure for hydrocephalus !!
Team Hydro will open our season on 2018 June 8 with our annual participation in the Alcatraz Sharkfest Swim!! Almost 100 swimmers will be proudly wearing a Team Hydro cap as they swim from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco in the is always challenging 2 mile swim!!
Swimmers will be jumping off the ferry at 8:50 am and braving the freezing cold and turbulent waters of the bay in an effort to fund a cure for an even more difficult and life-threatening medical condition! Swimmers who have not yet set up a fundraising page can do so HERE! Make your swim count and raise funds for hydrocephalus research! Join the team before and after the event at the Team Hydro banner to make new friends, get fired up for the swim, and of course grab your official race-sanctioned Team Hydro swi
Next up will be the 3rd Annual Dolphin Dash for Hydrocephalus Research on June 23rd!! This amazing event hosted and organized by the Dorset Dolphin Swim Team of Marietta, Georgia will consist of age-group swimmers (and any willing friends and family) swimming as far as they can during the morning of June 23rd in order to raise research funds.
The Dolphin Swim Team seeks to honor of all people with hydrocephalus, but is especially mindful of 3 special young people as they swim for research–Teammates Lilly B and Parker, as well as Charlie, (the nephew of the team’s coach) who all are currently living with shunted hydrocephalus!
This year, the Dolphins have invited swimmers from other teams in their league to join them in their quest to raise research funds for hydrocephalus!! Team Hydro could not be more proud of our Dolphin Dash swimmers, donors, and on-land supporters!
For More information on the 2018 Dolphin Dash, or to donate to the cause simply click HERE!
Team Hydro is also proud to announce that the 7th Annual Little Falls Swim for Hydrocephalus— the Penguin Plunge— will tamp place on July 3!! This incredible event, in Bethesda Maryland features the Mighty Penguins of Little Falls Swim Team who, have already raised tens of thousands of dollars for hydrocephalus research. The Team swims in honor of former teammate Kate Finlayson who passed from hydrocephalus at an early age. Team Hydro is amazed and grateful to the Penguins for their ongoing support of hydrocephalus research. We ARE making a difference, one stroke at a time!
Team Hydro will then host a second Alcatraz swim on Saturday, September 1. This special event will be open for registration soon! So stay tuned!
Team Hydro will round out its 2018 season in September by taking part in the Boston Harbor Swim for Hydrocephalus on September 9. Swimmers (or VOLUNTEERS) interested in participating in this event can sign up on the Sharfkfest site — Be sure to check the TEAM HYDRO BOX– sign-up HERE.
Team Hydro looks forward to another amazing year of raising funds for hydrocephalus research!
We remain grateful to ALL our swimmers, donors , and on-land supporters!!
And REMEMBER–you don’t have to be a swimmer to help the cause– ANYONE can raise funds for hydrocephalus research!
Help us FUND a CURE for this debilitating and life-threatening disease!
Set up your own fund raising page HERE!
Team Hydro, and the over 1 million Americans currently living with hydrocephalus–THANK YOU!!
See you in (or around) the water this summer!!
We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Michael Piper — sponsored by a Team Hydro seed grant — has won a $500,000 award from the government of Australia to expand his research on the molecular mechanisms of Hydrocephalus. This exciting progress — and 20:1 “return” on investment for Team Hydro — is the latest of several examples of Team Hydro seed grants that have collectively bloomed into several million dollars of public funding. Taken together, this success is a strong testament to our research investment model.
Research with a cure in mind
How — exactly — does Hydrocephalus arise? What are the molecular mechanisms that steer the development of a healthy brain, how do they break down in our beloved patient’s brains, and could we intervene to tip the balance back towards health? These are among the questions that work like Dr. Piper’s seeks to address.
When Dr. Piper applied for a Team Hydro/HA grant in 2015, he had conducted preliminary experiments which led him to believe that a transcription factor called NFIX might be a key player in the process through which young babies’ brains finish developing after birth. More specifically, he suspected that reduced NFIX might disrupt the migration of radial glia stem cells in the lateral ventricles (the part of the brain that produces most of our CSF, the “hydro” in hydrocephalus). By developing a special mouse that lacked NFIX — and new tools to study it — Dr. Piper proposed to paint the picture of how stem cells relied on NFIX. In so doing, he argued, he could gain insights into how hydrocephalus develops and perhaps guide interventions that could ameliorate its effects. Given his proposal, we were eager to see what he could find!
In the past several years, Dr. Piper’s theories have held up! In one recent paper in the journal Neural Development, the lab published the results of the very experiments Dr. Piper proposed to us in 2015. Among (a bunch of!) other results, he included one picture that our readers may appreciate. See the large black hole in right side of the image below? That is hydrocephalic fluid filling up the ventricles in the mouse without NFIX! Dr. Piper’s experiments documented this process in rich detail, AND revealed a new molecule that appeared to reverse the effect!
A bright future ahead
Given this success, it is unsurprising that the Australian government has agreed to extensively fund Dr. Piper’s lab to further test and expand these theories and their relevance to hydrocephalus. And given that the receipt of large public research grants is the lifeblood of academic research labs, Dr. Piper is well on his way to a long and highly productive career in this space! As he does so, the world will not just benefit from his work, but the work of all the students who he trains to be hydrocephalus researchers.
Ultimately, Team Hydro’s grant will be a small drop in the bucket of funding that Dr. Piper will leverage in his research on hydrocephalus. However, particularly these days, it is all-but-impossible for researchers to receive major public grants without the extensive preliminary data made possible through seed grants like Dr. Piper’s Innovator award.
At Team Hydro, we are dedicated to continuing to support promising researchers like Dr. Piper, so that they and their trainees may find firm initial footing within the hydrocephalus space. In doing so, it is our hope that these good men and women will continue to work on hydrocephalus until a cure can be found!
We aren’t done yet!
Care to support more revolutionary researchers like Dr. Piper? Visit donate.teamhydro.org/ !
As always, we continue to underwrite our own overhead, so that 100% of donations received at Team Hydro are used to fund cure-focused research in Hydrocephalus.
Thank you, Dr. Piper! And thank you to all the swimmers and donors who make Team Hydro possible.
Go Team Hydro! Find a Cure!