NIH awards $144 million for research on environmental effects on children

Research projects for creating new tools to more effectively gauge the impact of environmental exposures on child health and development have received $144 million in grants from the NIH, according to a press release.

“Technology advances have become a powerful driver in studying and understanding the start and spread of disease,” Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, director of the NIH, said in a news release. “These projects will expand the toolbox available to researchers to improve our ability to characterize environmental exposures, understand how environmental exposures affect in utero development and function, and bolster the infrastructure for exposure research.”

The NIH has allocated these funds to focus on how air pollution, pesticides, infectious diseases and psychosocial factors related to the environment impact on child development.

Initiatives for the grants include:

the development of new tools to enhance the study of environmental factors related to pediatric diseases;
the study of environmental factors related to in utero development, in order to prevent future complications; and
the leveraging of existing programs to expand the study of environmental influences on later child development.

The initiatives will advance the knowledge base for the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program, a multiyear plan that will launch in 2016.

“We are pursuing a new approach to achieve the goals of the former National Children’s Study,” Lawrence A. Tabak, DDS, PhD, principal deputy director of the NIH, said in the release. “The ECHO program will capitalize on existing participant populations, support approaches that evolve with the science and take advantage of the growing number of clinical research networks and technology advances.”