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NIH awards grants to six medical centers for Undiagnosed Diseases Network

The National Institutes of Health has announced the awarding of grants to establish six new clinical sites for the Undiagnosed Diseases Network.

The 4-year grants of approximately $7.2 million each will help to develop effective approaches for diagnosing the most difficult medical cases, according to an NIH press release.

“The NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Network has the potential to transform medicine and serve as a catalyst for new discoveries,” James M. Anderson, MD, PhD, director of the NIH Division of Program Coordination, Planning and Strategic Initiatives, said in the press release. “It is an ideal NIH Common Fund program — the only one focused on diagnoses of rare disorders.”

 

Credit: Jonathan Bailey, NHGRI

The included centers are: Baylor College of Medicine; Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital; Duke University; Stanford University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

The inclusion of six additional sites will allow the network to both draw upon the unique expertise of new clinical research groups and cultivate opportunities for collaboration among a larger group of expert laboratory and clinical investigators, the press release stated.

Since 2008, the Undiagnosed Diseases Program has discovered two unknown diseases and identified 15 genes not previously associated with other human disease, according to the press release.