Several Emory schools will receive part of a $157 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct research on the effects of environmental exposures on children’s health for a nationwide study in collaboration with other institutions, according to Associate Research Professor at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing Anne Dunlop. Emory, alongside 30 other universities and research institutions including Dartmouth College (N.H.) and University of California, Berkeley, will participate in the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program, a seven-year initiative to research environmental exposure’s effects on children’s health, according to a Sept. 21 NIH press release. During the study’s first two years, Emory will receive $2.48 million from the NIH, Dunlop said. After two years, NIH will evaluate each facility to determine whether its initial goals have been met, in which case it will receive a five-year award for nearly $14 million to continue the research, according to Associate Dean for Research at the School of Nursing Elizabeth Corwin. Various sectors of the University will collaborate on the research, including the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Emory College of Arts and Sciences’ Psychology Department, the Rollins School of Public Health and the Emory School of Medicine, Corwin said. Dunlop will be the principal investigator for the project alongside Corwin and Professor of Psychology Patricia Brennan. NIH awarded funds to institutions with existing pediatric cohorts — groups of research subjects — to further current research and to “add more sophisticated testing to what [institutions] have already been doing,” Corwin said. Emory will build upon its existing children’s health research, such as the Maternal Microbiome Project, the Epigenetics of Preterm Birth Project and the Infant Microbiome Project and “continue to follow children from [the] prenatal and perinatal studies as they [age] out of infancy,” Brennan said. Emory will study prenatal stress, environmental toxicants that impact fetal development and the microbiome, the microorganisms of a body. Emory’s cohort, consisting entirely of African American mothers and children, will provide data on a group that “has typically been underrepresented in research to the table,” Dunlop said. The study already has nearly 325 women enrolled and is currently enrolling almost 50 of their infants in the study, according to Dunlop. Every institution will pool data from all cohorts to create a single nationwide cohort, which will provide data on both similarities and differences between and within populations, Dunlop said. In addition to looking at how racial discrimination affects the health of African Americans, Emory will study how environmental risk factors, such as lead exposure and nutritional deficits, can impact biological processes, including the immune system, influencing the risk of children for obesity and autism, Brennan said. Long-term goals for Emory’s study include identifying the social, environmental and biological factors that put African American children at risk for poor health outcomes as well as effective prevention and treatment strategies. The NIH funding will allow Emory’s research to improve the health of African American children and “reflect the diversity of the community in which we live,” according to Brennan. She added that the data will be valuable to children’s health research. Brennan also noted that although the research is a collaborative effort between different sectors of Emory, all share a “common passion for research on children’s health and a desire to eliminate health disparities.”
Correction (11/26/16 at 8:59 p.m.): The article incorrectly stated that each facility will receive a five-year award for nearly $14 million if its initial goals are met. Each facility will receive a five-year award for more than $10 million.
The original headline “NIH Grants Emory $157 in Children’s Health Research Study” is inaccurate. The headline has been amended.
