NIH Reporter #5P50AA022534-13

C2-Scientific Core

Award to University of New Mexico Health Science Center for the C2-Scientific Core project supporting research on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders through standardized procedures, human subject recruitment, and statistical support to enhance integration and reduce costs across research components.

Description

The Scientific Core will facilitate the goals of the New Mexico Alcohol Research Center by supporting access to human subjects, consolidating and standardizing mouse prenatal and postnatal alcohol exposure procedures and colony management, and providing statistical support for all components of the center. Use of the Scientific Core will significantly decrease costs, prevent duplication of resources, and facilitate integration of results obtained across the center research components. The long-term goal of the New Mexico Alcohol Research Center is to increase understanding of mechanisms underlying the effect of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) on brain development and to develop novel diagnostic and therapeutic interventions for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs). The Scientific Core will support these goals by being a shared research resource that provides investigators with services, expertise, and training that will support, enhance, and integrate human and animal studies. Specifically, the Scientific Core will support the recruitment of human subjects for research components and future pilots via the Neurodiagnostic Clinic (Center for Developmental Disability - Department of Pediatrics). This will ensure that clinical projects focused on FASDs have access to appropriate subject populations. The Core will also consolidate and standardize prenatal and postnatal alcohol exposure procedures and mouse colony management for preclinical components. This will reduce research costs and allow investigators to query relationships between their findings and those obtained in other research components, facilitating integration. The Scientific Core will provide research support including biostatistics, study design, and data analysis to ensure rigor and reproducibility. It will facilitate the use of the Center for Brain Recovery & Repair Pre-Clinical Core for behavioral testing, slide scanning, and image analysis software. Additionally, it will support development of new research directions by assisting with behavioral and alcohol exposure paradigms. The centralized services will enable investigators to explore relationships across research components, promoting integration of the NMARC’s research efforts.

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