Dr. Misty Good

Good Lab NEC Awareness Day at UNC Children’s Hospital

Dr. Misty Good, the Division Chief of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) and has dedicated her career to preventing this devastating disease. NEC is a severe inflammatory intestinal disease that occurs unpredictably and without warning in infants, with preterm babies being at the highest risk. Dr. Good’s research team strives to find new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat NEC. She is the founder and director of the NEC Biorepository, which includes multiple centers from across the country working together to enroll infants with and without NEC to learn as much as possible about this disease. Using these samples, Dr. Good’s team is working to identify new disease biomarkers, hopefully allowing clinicians to diagnose infants with NEC sooner, leading to earlier treatment and potentially saving lives. Dr. Good has also developed new techniques to study potential therapies for NEC. These NEC models use cells from surgically resected intestinal samples from infants with NEC or other intestinal diseases. These models allow Dr. Good’s team to study the ability of new potential therapeutics to prevent inflammation and tissue damage, as seen in NEC.

In addition to her research, Dr. Good is committed to supporting families of infants with NEC. She works closely with the NEC Society and is partnering with families, including the Parker Family, who lost their newborn son to NEC, to provide educational resources and community support for the families of infants diagnosed with NEC in the NICU. Through collaboration with families and other scientists, Dr. Good is hopeful that one day, NEC will be a disease of the past.

We hope to raise $30,000 in pursuit of a bedside screening test that will allow earlier intervention and hopefully save lives. To help us reach this goal, a generous donor has pledged to match every gift we receive up to $7,500. Will you Give Now to help us reach our goal and continue this research?