The Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Center (KIDDRC) supports rigorous and high-impact basic and applied research within themes that are relevant to the etiology, identification, prevention, and treatment of intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The Center is organized around projects that fall into four basic themes: (1) Language, Communication Disorders, and Cognition, (2) Risk, Intervention, and Prevention, (3) The Neurobiology of IDD, and (4) Cellular and Molecular Biology of Early Development. To achieve its mission, the KIDDRC seeks to develop new interdisciplinary research initiatives relevant to the Center?s mission by bringing together scientists across the various sites of the Kansas Center as well as promoting collaboration with researchers at other institutions. It supports existing and new projects with cost- effective, scientifically generative, state-of-the-art core services, resources, and facilities that directly enhance the quality, quantity, and impact of science produced by center investigators and their collaborators, and to provide highly efficient, cost-effective systems for planning, developing, managing, coordinating, and disseminating research activities associated with the center. The KIDDRC proposes to operate five Cores in support of its projects. An Administrative Core coordinates and integrates services and functions across the three physical locations of the KIDDRC in Lawrence and Kansas City and provides scientific leadership and governance mechanisms to ensure that scientific cores are current and efficiently run. A Clinical Translational Core provides KIDDRC investigators with several tools for enhancing translational research, addressed broadly by facilitating contact with individuals with IDD for research. A Preclinical Models Core facilitates translational applications by assisting in the development of cellular and organismal models of IDD. This is done by providing infrastructure and resources needed to create and characterize laboratory models of IDD and by extending KIDDRC?s prior capabilities for analyzing behavior, anatomy, physiology, and gene expression. This latter goal includes cutting-edge genome editing technologies to aid in generating cellular models using patient?derived cells. A Clinical Outcomes/Biobehavioral Technology Core provides high-quality, cost-effective support to KIDDRC research programs requiring quantitative measurement of human neurobehavioral and behavioral outcomes, as well as biological correlates. The CBC includes tools for the generating, collecting, automating, and validating such measures. The fifth core is a Research Design and Analysis Core (RDAC), which supports the analysis of data from both preclinical and clinical research through state-of-the-art statistical and bioinformatics methods. Finally, a Research Component housed within the KIDDRC seeks to evaluate the efficacy of multimodal intervention for language in a group of children with autism and minimal verbal skills by comparing results from an experimental intervention to a treatment-as- usual condition, and compare two intensities of the multimodal intervention.
The Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center is committed to the generation and synthesis of new knowledge about the causes, prevention, management, and treatment of intellectual and developmental disabilities at the environmental, behavioral, neural/cellular, molecular, and genetic levels.
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