The Children's Hospital Foundation is getting a $10 million grant for pediatric transplantation from the Henry L. Hillman Foundation and the Hillman Foundation, the largest single gift in the hospital's 100-year history, officials announced yesterday.

The joint gift, among the largest ever awarded by the foundations, was approved Tuesday by both of their boards of directors.

The funds will be used to establish the Hillman Endowment for Pediatric Transplantation Research and the Hillman Pediatric Transplantation Institute at the new Children's Hospital campus set to open on the site of the old St. Francis Hospital in Lawrenceville in 2008.

In a prepared statement, Henry Hillman said the foundations were "delighted to support the wonderful work" at Children's in pediatric transplantation.

"Pittsburgh is already on the cutting edge in this field," he said, adding that the grant would help the hospital "launch a new era in pediatric transplantation."

DeAnn Marshall, the Children's Hospital Foundation's executive vice president, said the gift will create an endowment for the transplant program. Revenues generated from the endowment will be used to expand the program's clinical and research efforts, she said.

The grant will support numerous initiatives, including research, advanced training, state-of-the-art immune monitoring and development of bio-artificial support systems specifically for pediatric transplant patients.

Children's is the nation's busiest pediatric transplant center and has been a leader in developing strategies to manage organ rejection. The endowment could lead to research advances that could help children worldwide, Marshall said.

"We really want to use this to propel the program forward into a new era," said Dr. George Mazariegos, director of pediatric transplantation at the hospital.

For example, instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, he and his colleagues want to do research that might show them how to tailor anti-rejection drug regimens to patients based on their individual immune systems or genetic makeup.

They then might be able to minimize or eliminate transplant patients' needs for the medicines.

"A lot of our work has shown that patients tend to be on perhaps more [drugs] than they absolutely need," Mazariegos said.

He added that the funding will also support research on artificial livers and hearts, which might aid recovery or act as so-called bridges to transplantation.

The Hillman grants are the lead gift in the Children's Hospital Foundation's capital campaign, now in its initial phase. Henry Hillman, who was a trustee of Children's Hospital for more than 40 years, is the campaign's honorary chairman. He also co-chaired, with the late Ben Fisher, a capital campaign at Children's in the early 1980s.

Ron Wertz, president of the two Hillman foundations, said equal portions of the $10 million grant came from the Hillman Foundation, established in 1951 by Hillman's father, and from the Henry L. Hillman Foundation, established by the younger Hillman in the 1960s.

He said the Pittsburgh-based foundations often work together and primarily support local agencies.