# ECHO Consortium on Perinatal Programming of Neurodevelopment

> **NIH NIH UH3** · ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI · 2021 · $8,469,266

## Abstract

Environmental interactions with genes, co-occurring environmental factors, sex, and life stage define normal
variation and adverse neurodevelopment over the life course. Beginning in utero, the central nervous system
(CNS) develops sequentially with network components of distinct functional domains (e.g., attention, memory, etc.)
developing at different times. Thus, toxin effects depend both on timing of exposure and dose. The developing
fetus and infant are most vulnerable. Moreover, pregnant women and children are not exposed to a single
chemical but to complex chemical mixtures. Complex interactions between chemical and non-chemical
stressors as well as sex can also influence outcomes. We propose a new ECHO Consortium of 5,000
prenatally enrolled and prospectively followed ethnically diverse mothers and their children to better address
these complexities. Our UG3 mission will be to measure environmental exposures across pregnancy and
childhood to determine how pro-oxidant environmental factors affect neurodevelopment. We will leverage
methodological advances developed by our team including 1) a novel tooth-based biomarker that can
objectively ; 2) satellite remote sensing based air pollution models
that can reconstruct ; 3) mixtures statistics; and 4) data-driven statistical
reconstruct past exposure timing and dose
past exposure timing and dose
methods to identify vulnerable windows. The Mount Sinai Consortium will also be part of the larger national
ECHO synthetic cohort to study the health impacts of chemicals, nutrition, social factors, the biological
response to these exposures, and the gene-environment interactions that underlie childhood disease more
broadly. We can both meet our UG3 aims and the goals of the ECHO UH3, as our cohorts have extensive
biobanking to facilitate expanded exposure assessment and mechanistic studies and our team has the
requisite expertise in phenotyping in the four ECHO focus areas, in exposure science, and in cohort
management. In this application, we will establish the infrastructure to coordinate, plan, and communicate with
the four cohorts that make up our consortium, while performing similar functions within the greater NIH ECHO
program, working with the Coordinating Center, the ECHO Data Center, the Pediatric Research Outcomes
(PRO) Core, the future Genomics Core, and the CHEAR Exposure Core. Our Consortium will harmonize the
databases of our four established cohorts to achieve these goals in tandem with experts in data science from
the CHEAR Network Data Center. This proposal links highly experienced environmental health scientists with,
statisticians, social epidemiologists, stress researchers, child psychologists, chemists, pediatricians,
toxicologists, geneticists, and epigeneticists to build the infrastructure and scientific capacity to create a highly
functional, state of the art longitudinal birth cohort consortium that objectively measures human environments
that program child health and integrat...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10239019
- **Project number:** 5UH3OD023337-06
- **Recipient organization:** ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI
- **Principal Investigator:** Robert O Wright
- **Activity code:** UH3 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $8,469,266
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2016-09-21 → 2023-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10239019

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10239019, ECHO Consortium on Perinatal Programming of Neurodevelopment (5UH3OD023337-06). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10239019. Licensed CC0.

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