Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent comparative assessment he has made of the UK level of research funding into Kawasaki disease with that of other EU member states.

The Department has not made a recent comparative assessment of the United Kingdom level of research funding into Kawasaki disease with that of other European Union member states.

The EU has recently agreed to fund a Kawasaki disease study led from Great Ormond Street Hospital/University College London. The trial, which aims to recruit 262 children from 40 centres across Europe, will look at the effectiveness of using of steroids in addition to the standard treatment for Kawasaki syndrome, intravenous immunoglobulins. The award is for over €5 million in funding for the trial to be run through a new European consortium, connect4children.

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre was funded between 2013-18 to carry out a project on the ‘Genetic determinants of Kawasaki disease for susceptibility and outcome’ with NIHR funding of £77,000.