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201910 Developmental Mechanisms of Human Structural Birth Defects

Program seeks Council approval for an initiative entitled “Developmental Mechanisms of Human Structural Birth Defects”.

In the US, 3% of babies are born with a structural birth defect. Structural birth defects have a great impact on public health, socioeconomics, and family life.  Understanding the causes of human structural birth defects has been, and continues to be, a high priority goal for the NICHD.

The goal of this initiative is to support innovative, multidisciplinary, interactive, and synergistic projects that integrate basic and translational approaches to understand the developmental biology and genetic basis of congenital human malformations.  The component projects must share a common central theme, focus, or objective on a specific developmental malformation that is genotypically, mechanistically, biologically, or phenotypically analogous between both animal models and humans.

Investigators supported by the NICHD work together as part of the NICHD Structural Birth Defects Working Group.  The goal of the working group is to stimulate collaborative efforts between basic scientists and physician scientists working with patients to jointly address the complex mechanisms underlying structural birth defects and to train the next generation of team researchers.   Projects funding through this initiative will join this group. 

This is a request to support a continuing initiative to sustain these collaborative efforts. The program has been highly successful, however, many gaps in our knowledge remain and many structural defects have not yet been studied.  To continue to move forward, we need to sustain a critical mass of such collaborations.

This proposed concept aligns with the NICHD Vision area of Developmental Biology.

This proposed concept aligns with the DBSVB research priority on Structural Birth Defects.

Program Contact

Reiko Toyama
Developmental Biology and Structural Variation Branch(DBSVB)

 

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