Arkansas Children’s Research Institute (ACRI) will receive $1.9 million as an integral component in a seven-year, $157 million initiative announced by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how children’s health is affected by their environment.
The Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program will investigate how exposure to a range of environmental factors in early development – from conception through early childhood – influences the health of children and adolescents.
The initial $1.9 million will be awarded to ACRI over four years, funding the infrastructure for a network that will connect children to clinical trials so they have better access to drugs that can improve and save their lives.
The collaboration with NIH supports the formation of Arkansas Center for Advancing Pediatric Therapeutics (ArCAPT), allowing a diverse group of children to participate in clinical trials that will be administered by some of the nation’s top pediatric drug experts, located at ACRI and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS.)
This will give children in Arkansas the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of early phase clinical trials for infants, children and adolescents as new drugs and therapies are created.
“This new award from NIH will enable Arkansas Children’s to not only become part of a new, national network designed to conduct novel clinical trials of great importance to children but also enable us to launch an exciting new facet of our institution’s research program,” said ACRI President Gregory L. Kearns, PharmD, PhD, FAAP, also a member of the World Health Organization’s Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Evaluation. “The greatest value of the work that will be undertaken by ArCAPT is that it will be focused squarely on the objective assessment of treatments intended to make children better today and healthier tomorrow.”
Kearns is Arkansas Children’s senior vice president and chief research officer and serves as a professor of Pediatrics at UAMS.
Today, children are under-represented in clinical trials, especially in rural states like Arkansas. Research published in Pediatrics in 2012 indicates that for every 10 adult clinical trials, less than one drug is studied in children. The goal of ArCAPT will be to draw on ECHO resources to make those trials more accessible to children, easing the burden of illness.
ArCAPT will focus on interventions in neonatology, asthma, endocrine disorders and diabetes and obesity. It will be led by Kearns and Laura James, MD, FAAP, associate vice chancellor for clinical and translational research at UAMS, an ACRI researcher and director of ACRI’s acetaminophen toxicity research laboratory. James is also a professor of Pediatrics in the UAMS College of Medicine and director of UAMS’ Translational Research Institute.
Arkansas’ participation in the ECHO program will position the state as a vital, leading contributor to NIH’s Institutional Development Award (IDeA) States Pediatric Clinical Trial Network. It will supplement the local, regional and national pediatric clinical research infrastructure, and close the disparity and knowledge gap that currently exits for pediatric clinical research in the United States.
Experiences during sensitive developmental windows, including around the time of conception, later in pregnancy, and during infancy and early childhood, can have long-lasting effects on the health of children. These experiences encompass a broad range of exposures, from air pollution and chemicals in our neighborhoods, to societal factors such as stress, to individual behaviors like sleep and diet. They may act through any number of biological processes, for example changes in the expression of genes or development of the immune system.
The awards will build the infrastructure and capacity for the ECHO program to support multiple, synergistic longitudinal studies that extend and expand existing cohort studies of mothers and their children, such as ArCAPT at ACRI.
The Arkansas project will have three specific aims:
• Linking research resources already established at ACRI and UAMS to support clinical trials.
• Providing supervised professional development, training the next generation of pediatric clinical researchers through high quality education.
• Creating a state-of-the-art clinical trial platform for infants, children and adolescents.
ECHO research will focus on factors that may influence health outcomes around the time of birth as well as into later childhood and adolescence, including upper and lower airway health and development, obesity, and brain and nervous system development. A critical component of ECHO will be to use the NIH-funded Institutional Development Awards (IDeA) program to build state-of-the art pediatric clinical research networks in rural and medically underserved areas, so that children from these communities can participate in clinical trials.
“I’m very excited to work with many of our nation’s best scientists to tackle vital unanswered questions about child health and development,” said ECHO Program Director Matthew W. Gillman, MD. “I believe we have the right formula of cohorts, clinical trials and supporting resources, including a range of new tools and measures, to help figure out which factors may allow children to achieve the best health outcomes over their lifetimes.”
Learn more about the ECHO program components and the awardees for each component here.