Meet the team behind c4c! We are a diverse group of people from many different backgrounds, but all of us are working towards a common goal: better medicines for children through European clinical trials. Today’s spotlight is on Jaana Kallio from the Helsinki University Hospital. You will be surprised in how many parallel activities Jaana is involved, from helping researchers with paperwork to preparing the future of c4c!
Jaana is an experienced paediatrician and clinical pharmacologist, devoted to finding the best treatments for sick children. After several decades of helping children struggling with diseases, she now mostly provides indispensable background support to make paediatric clinical trials succeed. She thus offers important services for the development of better medicines for babies, children and young people.
In her long career, Jaana worked as a university researcher and professor as well. She also worked for the European Medicines Agency, that evaluates and supervises the use of medicines in Europe. She now wants to share her experience with her colleagues. That’s why she is also enthusiastically supporting online classes available through the c4c Academy, an online training platform for all people involved in c4c.
Offering essential background support
For most of her time, Jaana is now coordinating different paediatric studies at the Helsinki University Hospital, c4c’s Finnish National Hub that organises c4c activities within a group of cooperating hospitals in Finland. She specifically works at the clinical trial unit of the hospital’s children’s department, where she takes up responsibilities in different paediatric clinical studies from research centres and companies.
She doesn’t have direct contact with the participating patients, but provides the researchers of the clinical trials with all the necessary support. “I’m in the background, taking care of paperwork and advising the researchers if problems come up in the course of a study,” explains Jaana.
Besides this work for c4c, she also sees patients at her private practice. What drives her, and causes her to keep having such a busy schedule, is pure passion for helping young patients!
Paving the way for c4c’s future
Jaana is also helping to prepare c4c’s future, after the European funding for the project ends. She is assisting in the development of a business model, the plan to efficiently set up a new organisation that can continue the good work carried out by all those involved in the c4c project.
“For the development of this plan, we first looked at other clinical trial networks for inspiration, but that proved to be complicated, because there is not really a similar network out there in Europe. In the United States, the I‑ACT organisation serves as a very good example, and we have been discussing many times with its team.”
After this first phase, Jaana helped to define which services the successor of c4c should focus on, and she currently also works on the financial part of the project. “We will of course establish a non-profit organisation,” she emphasises. The team at c4c already drew up a plan for the first five years of the new organisation, which will start its activities in the next few years.
