photo by: University of Kansas

The University of Kansas Medical Center campus in Kansas City, Kan. is pictured.

The University of Kansas Medical Center has been awarded a five-year, $31 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to coordinate clinical trials for infants and children in rural and underserved areas. The grant is the largest five-year award in the history of KU Medical Center and one of the largest such awards ever received at the University of Kansas, according to a news release Thursday from KU.

In partnership with the University of Nebraska Medical Center, KU Medical Center will serve as the Data Coordinating and Operations Center for the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Institutional Development Award States (IDeA) Pediatric Clinical Trials Network.

“KU Medical Center has been building the biostatistics and informatics infrastructure necessary for the DCOC for 20 years,” said Matthew Mayo, founding chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at KU Medical Center and the lead investigator on the grant. “The ultimate goal is to support high-quality, multi-center trials that generate valuable knowledge and lead to improved health outcomes for a wider range of children across the country.”

The Data Coordinating and Operations Center will provide data coordination and biostatistics support, facilitate multisite study design and results dissemination, help coordinate with local health systems, and train researchers and clinicians to increase their capacity to conduct pediatric research.

The NIH created the IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network in 2016 to provide access to clinical trials for rural or underserved children living in IDeA states. These states have historically low levels of research funding and limited access to vital clinical trials. The IDeA program was created to broaden the geographic distribution of NIH funding for biomedical and behavioral research.

There are 18 clinical research sites in the IDeA States Pediatric Clinical Trials Network. This grant will enable the Data Coordinating and Operations Center to serve as the centralized unit that will support clinical trials across it.