Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center announced today that it received a $32.5 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Bench to Bassinet Program to uncover the reasons why pediatric patients are born with heart issues, and develop effective treatments.
Congenital heart defects (CHDs) are the most common form of birth defect and affect almost 40,000 births each year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The prevalence of some CHDS, especially mild types, are increasing, and other types are remaining stable.
NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute launched the Bench to Bassinet Program in order to speed up the transition of cardiovascular research from discovery to translational research to clinical testing. To date, the program has gathered clinical, environmental and genomic data for over 10,000 children with heart defects.
With the funds, Cincinnati Children’s will become the administrative coordinating center for the program. That means that it will provide the infrastructure to foster partnerships among the members of the program and facilitate the transition of research from the lab to the clinic.
The medical center will also be the program’s "genomic data hub” and collect, integrate and provide more than 150 terabytes of molecular data to the cardiac research community.
"As the coordinating center, we can make sure that research infrastructure and data are shared and integrated to accelerate discovery of the genetic and biological mechanisms of congenital heart defects," said Eileen C. King, principal investigator of the project and associate professor in the division of biostatistics and epidemiology at Cincinnati Children's, said in a statement. "This will ultimately lead to improvements in treating or even preventing these often devastating defects."
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has also contributed to the funding. The organization is investing in the program to support research that investigates the high prevalence of neurodevelopmental disabilities among pediatric patients with severe heart defects.
This grant is believed to be the biggest single grant that the medical center has ever received.
