Read about the 2009 tournament. 

More than 100 golfers braved a wet and stormy course May 30, 2008, in the name of Zachary Meehan. They gathered at the Oakmount Green Golf Course in Hampstead, Md., for the 11th Annual Zachary Meehan Memorial Golf Tournament to help fund research at Hopkins Children’s to prevent the leading reason for all pediatric liver transplants: biliary atresia. A rare obstruction and inflammation of the bile ducts it causes bile to pool in the liver, with devastating consequences. Its cause is still unknown and its present “cure” lies only in a transplant.

Diagnosed with the disorder at 4 weeks-of-age, Zachary died April 12, 1997, two days after a liver transplant at Hopkins Children’s in a desperate last bid to save him. “They did all they could for him,” says his mother Patty, who donated a portion of her liver for the surgery.

Nearly a decade later, funds raised through a foundation the Meehans established in their son’s name have fueled a research discovery that may one day help give children like Zachary a future. Hopkins Children’s researchers, led by Maria Grazia Clemente and sponsored by the Zachary Meehan Biliary Atresia Research Foundation at Johns Hopkins, have discovered that a rotavirus (SA11), known to cause the disease in mice, also grows in human bile duct cells and normal liver cells. “In the lab, those infected cells became spectacularly malformed, which is exactly what happens in biliary atresia,” says Kathleen  Schwarz, M.D., director of the Pediatric Liver Center at Hopkins Children’s and senior author of the study. “We’ve known a lot about its inflammatory process, but not what causes it. This may be about to change.”

The next step, she continues, is to test serum samples from babies with biliary atresia to see if they’ve antibodies to this rotavirus in infected bile ducts. The Hopkins group has applied to the Biliary Atresia Research Consortium (an NIH funded multi-center study) for 173 serum samples collected by the group. “We think now that the rotavirus may unmask hidden proteins in the bile duct cells that trigger an intense inflammatory response.”

Clemente and Schwarz presented their findings Saturday, June 7, at The American Association for the Study of Liver Disease Single Topic Conference on Biliary Epithelia at Emory University in Atlanta.

For information on the Meehans’ foundation or how you can help, contact Patty Meehan, pmeehan7@verizon.net or 410-461-5934. Their tournament returns in 2009, on June 12 at Oakmount Green Golf Course.