The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has announced it will house the Network Coordinating Center for a newly established data-sharing collaborative organization, the Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics Research Network.
According to Children's Hospital, the Research Network was launched this year with a three-year, $600,000 grant from the federal government's Maternal Child Health Bureau.
The Network brings together experts from 12 leading pediatric programs to focus on a broad range of neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism spectrum disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and intellectual disability (formerly referred to as mental retardation).
According to Nathan Blum, MD, chair of the Network's Executive Committee, and the director of the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) Program at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the new Network's initial tasks will be to agree on a research agenda, standardize data collection from its member sites, and initiate smaller projects to share data.
By fostering collaboration among leading clinical and research programs, the Network will be able to sponsor multi-site studies in many patients to provide a large enough sample size to properly evaluate new treatments as they are developed, Blum said.
"Having a developmental-pediatrics research network will provide greater opportunities to investigate the effectiveness of new drug candidates, and more rapidly translate basic science findings into eventual clinical treatments," he said.
Other members of the Network are Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Boston University Medical Center; Children's Hospital, Boston; Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center; Hasbro Children's Hospital; Lucile Packard Children's Hospital; Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital; the University of Arkansas Medical Center; the University of California at Davis MIND Institute; the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center; and the Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital.
