The community of children served by Houston hospitals just got quite a bit bigger.

On Wednesday morning, Texas Children's Hospital (TCH) and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) announced the launch of an ambitious collaborative program — the Center for Global Child Health (CGCH).

"It's our newest initiative," Mark Wallace, president and CEO of TCH, said at a press conference. "We're expanding access to health care. We recognize that we can and must do something for all children. We have the resources to help, and we have a moral obligation to put our knowledge to use. We're expanding our commitment."

In the tradition of visionary leadership between TCH and BCM, the Center for Global Child Health aims to transform the lives of children with severe yet treatable diseases — for the better.

"We've provided tremendous medical care for kids in our community," said Dr. Paul Klotman, president and chief executive officer of BCM. "But our community has definitely changed."

With a focus on those global health issues that affect child morbidity and mortality, the center is poised to screen, treat, and educate the population at-large on diseases such as cancer, sickle cell, malaria, malnutrition, and tuberculosis in medically underserved parts of the world.

This isn't the first international project for the esteemed group of doctors heading up this project, though. The center will piggyback on the research discovered through 15 years of work at the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative (BIPAI) at TCH, with clinics in Europe and Africa.

"We established BIPAI 15 years ago, when they said it was a waste [to treat children with HIV/AIDS] and it couldn't be done," said Dr. Mark Kline, physician-in-chief at TCH, chair of pediatrics at BCM, and founder of BIPAI. But after providing treatment for over 80,000 children, "It was an addictive experience to see children restored to health in that program."

"We're going to take what we've learned in BIPAI, use the platform, and layer on programs for other life-threatening diseases," Kline said.

In order to make CGCH happen, TCH and BCM went after the best pediatric scientist they could find to lead the charge. A prominent expert in the field. Someone who was passionate about the underserved. Someone who was willing to undertake big international challenges. Someone like accomplish physician-scientist Dr. Russell Ware, the chair of the department of hematology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Ware has Houston ties — he completed his pediatric residency training at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital in 1986.

"It is a bold initiative, and I suspect it will be a transformative program for both groups. This is a head-turner if there ever was one, at the national and international level, to have programs that are traditionally based in local regions," said Ware, director of the new center. "To have not only a vision for outward local outreach, but to have a mandate ... a moral obligation to address medical issues affecting developing countries, underserved populations — this is really the right way to go."

Under Ware's direction, CGCH's first action will be to screen and treat children with sickle cell disease in Angola in a project funded by a $4 million gift from Chevron.

"This center will roll out major initiatives at the global level," said Ware. "We have the opportunity to do something different — to export western care into developing countries."