The Rhode Island Child Clinical Trials Collaborative (RI-CCTC) at Hasbro Children's Hospital, Women &Infants Hospital and Brown University will be an ideal clinical center for the ISPCTN. Our State demographicincludes many underserved, minority and immigrant children, who have high rates of infant mortality, asthma,obesity, prematurity, mental health problems and special health care needs. This high risk population has notbeen previously included in many clinical studies; hence, they will benefit both directly and indirectly from thework of the RI-CCTC. Rhode Island is uniquely organized for population-based clinical research: it has onemajor obstetric hospital (70% of all deliveries in the state), one children's hospital (90% of all pediatricadmissions in the state) and one health department, as well as an engaged community. These factors allowfor effective enrollment, retention and follow-up of study participants in clinical trials, giving the RI-CCTC thepotential to make a strong impact. We will leverage our rich network of collaborations with many existingresearch, education and public health programs, as well as affiliations with national research networks. Thesepartners share our commitment to children's health and child health research. The Brown University Schoolof Public Health and the Alpert Medical School, including the Departments of Pediatrics and OB/GYN, recentlyreceived a large gift to create the Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute (HCHII), which is focused onunderstanding the prenatal, perinatal and postnatal factors that lead to childhood asthma, obesity and autism.Funding of the RI-CCTC will enable us to leverage the resources of the HCHII to create a much broader andmore powerful research network to serve children in the state of RI. Investigators in the Schools of PublicHealth and Medicine have considerable expertise in the study of environmental exposures and their impacton children. The PI, Phyllis A. Dennery, has had consistent NIH funding for her basic/translational research,has participated in many training grants and multicenter clinical trials, and has won mentoring awards. TheCo-PIs, Drs. Abbott Laptook and Thomas Chun, have been active participants in the NIH funded NeonatalResearch Network and the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network. This team will ensure thesuccess of the RI-CCTC in fulfilling the intent of the ECHO Program to investigate the longitudinal impact ofpre-, peri-, and postnatal environmental exposures on pediatric health outcomes.
Our Specific Aims are to: 1)Provide new opportunities for patient enrollment in a national pediatric network through collaborationbetween academic research centers and institutions; 2) Leverage established strengths in public health andepidemiology to identify environmental exposures that will support the prospective trials of theISPCTN; 3) Develop programs to educate and mentor clinicians and basic scientists to becomeindependent investigators in the area of clinical research
The objective of the RICCTC is to create a network to advance the field of Pediatric Medicine byestablishing and maintaining a network of academic centers that perform multi-center clinicalprotocols in a rigorous manner to investigate the safety and efficacy of treatment andmanagement strategies to care for children. The state of Rhode Island offers a very diversepopulation of children for the requirements of the grant.
| Snowden, Jessica; Darden, Paul; Palumbo, Paul et al. (2018) The institutional development award states pediatric clinical trials network: building research capacity among the rural and medically underserved. Curr Opin Pediatr 30:297-302 |
