NIH Awards $29M For Research On 200 Rare Diseases
By C. Rajan, contributing writer
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is awarding $29 million in research funding to study more than 200 rare diseases. The funds will go towards the expansion of the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network (RDCRN), led by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).
According to the NIH, there are thousands of rare diseases which together affect an estimated 25 million Americans. However, only a few hundred rare diseases have approved treatments available.
The researchers will look at ways to overcome the problems which have made it difficult to develop treatments for rare diseases, including a wide-spread base of patients and scientific experts, difficulty in diagnosing the diseases, and lack of data from natural history studies.
“NCATS seeks to tackle these challenges in an integrated way by working to identify common elements among rare diseases,” said NCATS Director Christopher P. Austin, M.D. “The RDCRN consortia provide a robust data source that enables scientists to better understand and share these commonalities, ultimately allowing us to accelerate the development of new approaches for diagnosing and treating rare diseases.”
The awards will help the collaborative efforts of physician scientists at 22 RDCRN consortia and nearly 100 patient advocacy groups to advance clinical research and investigate new treatments for rare diseases. Researchers at these 22 consortia will conduct two or more multisite clinical studies, including a natural history study for a group of at least three related rare diseases.
The funding will also go towards establishing six new RDCRN consortia for tackling different disease areas, including bone diseases, food allergy disorders, lung diseases, and three different types of neurological diseases: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), autism, and frontotemporal lobar degeneration, among others.
This latest funding announcement is part of a series of recent research funding by the NIH. In the past month, the NIH has awarded several grants and funds including:
- Awards of nearly $32 million to develop new strategies to analyze and use ‘Big Data’ gleaned from research studies
- Funds totaling $46 million to support the BRAIN Initiative.
- Funding awards of $35 million over the next five years for the Centers for Collaborative Research in Fragile X program.
- Seven research contracts for new vaccine adjuvants discovery, with total funds of over $70 million over the next five years.
Funding of $17 million to support the next phase of the Tissue Chip for Drug Screening program.