Last Update: 03/07/2007 Printer Friendly Printer Friendly   Email This Page Email This Page  

Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Centers (MRDDRCs)

birth defectsThe MRDDRC program, funded through the NICHD Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities (MRDD) Branch, currently consists of 14 Centers located at universities and children’s hospitals throughout the country. A core grant mechanism funds infrastructure in the form of cores that support independently funded, MRDD-relevant projects and new program development projects. New program development projects represent a small portion of the overall budget expenditure within an individual Center.

Similarly, while other centers that access MRDDRCs have some unique cores, they use existing affiliate MRDDRC cores extensively. The centers differ in many aspects, including (but not limited to) their scientific focus, size, lifespan, and history. Although these differences impart a unique quality to and environment for each center, the MRDDRCs share some common features that are discernible and important:

  • Each center presently supports at least 40 to more than 100 projects, and at least 20 to more than 70 principal investigators (hereafter called “affiliates”), who receive funding from numerous NIH Institutes and Centers, other federal agencies, and foundations within the private sector, allowing the centers to support substantially more projects and affiliates than would be possible using NICHD support alone.
  • The MRDDRCs increasingly leverage resources from their environment (e.g., host institutions, private donors, etc.) to facilitate growth, which stimulates MRDD research far in excess of the NICHD’s investment and makes the Institute’s contribution very cost-effective.
  • The MRDDRCs continue to increase the quality and diversity of the services that they provide. Information technology and bioinformatics and biostatistics services support gene array, proteomics, and behavioral and clinical core services. Translational and clinical research projects now comprise almost half of all projects for a growing minority of centers, particularly those that competed successfully in 2004. The centers now actively pioneer new technologies and instrument development that represent unique, evolving resources.

2007, which is the fifth-year hiatus in the competition of the MRDDRCs, will provide program staff the opportunity to update program guidelines and issue new guidelines that reflect new program goals. As more investigators accessing the centers receive their funding from other Institutes, government agencies, and foundations, program staff will reach out to other agencies and enlist them as partners to enhance funding of the MRDDRCs. Such partnering and outreach enables expansion of core services at some centers, facilitates sharing of unique resources among investigators at various MRDDRCs and collaboration among users, and stimulates translation of knowledge about the causes of MRDD to interventions. Such partnering also permits the MRDDRCs to better stimulate translation, enabling them to adapt and adopt infrastructure necessary for maintaining and linking databases for the collection and sharing of information, thus enhancing the power of studying specific populations.