HAPPI Kids Study

Project status: Active

Research area: Clinical Sciences > Haematology

Healthy babies and children for better diagnostics and research

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"Children are not little adults."

By defining healthy ranges and providing high-quality samples for research and development, we accelerate the discovery of safer, more effective diagnostics and therapies for babies and children in Australia and around the world.

Our mission is to make blood tests, diagnoses and treatments safer and more accurate for children by ensuring decisions are based on evidence from children, not adults.

What is HAPPI Kids?

HAPPI Kids, Harmonising Age Pathology Parameters in Kids, is a world-leading program dedicated to collecting, storing, and studying blood samples from healthy babies and children.

By defining what “normal” looks like, we empower researchers, clinicians, and industry partners to develop better diagnostics, safer treatments, and more effective therapies for children everywhere.

For the last 10 years, HAPPI Kids has collected high-quality blood samples from healthy children from birth to 18 years, with careful ethical and clinical oversight. These samples help us define what is normal at different ages, giving doctors better benchmarks to interpret a child’s blood test results.

Without child-specific data, doctors may be forced to compare a two-year-old’s blood results against adult norms; a practice that can risk misdiagnosis, incorrect treatment and unnecessary anxiety for families.

HAPPI Kids also supports research, new diagnostic tests and the development of medicines and treatments designed with children in mind.

What we offer

Six ways we accelerate paediatric research

Our capabilities span the full research and development pipeline from early stage biomarker discovery through to clinical validation and standardisation.

Reference range development

Establishing robust, age-appropriate reference intervals for routine pathology tests, providing the clinical benchmarks that laboratories and diagnostics companies require.

Novel test and biomarker development

Research and development of standard and novel diagnostic tests and biomarkers, validated against age-stratified healthy paediatric populations across the full developmental spectrum.

Rare disease controls

Provision of age-appropriate healthy controls for rare disease testing, giving researchers the validated comparison populations their studies require.

In vitro drug testing

Age-stratified in vitro drug testing across the full paediatric developmental spectrum, enabling pharmaceutical partners to understand drug behaviour in children at every stage of development.

Comprehensive omics profiling

Full omics profiling capabilities spanning genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and beyond, delivering multi-dimensional biological data across the paediatric age spectrum.

Age-related disease research

Investigation of age-related biological changes linked to adult disease burden, tracing the developmental origins of disease from the earliest stages of life.

Our unique advantage

We collect blood samples from healthy children.

Healthy ethnically diverse populations

Most biobanks and paediatric datasets draw from disease populations, because that's who needs a blood test. HAPPI Kids samples are exclusively from healthy children and babies, giving a true, unconfounded biological baseline that is extraordinarily rare in paediatric research.

Full developmental spectrum

From neonates through to 18 years of age. Every critical stage of childhood development is covered within a single, standardised program, eliminating the need to piece together data from multiple incomplete sources.

High-quality samples, standardised from collection to analysis

Multi-site collection across two major Victorian hospitals with rigorous standardisation protocols and quality controls. Our data meets the standards required for peer-reviewed publication and regulatory submissions.