The Fetal Basis of Adult Disease: Role of the Environment

The summary for the The Fetal Basis of Adult Disease: Role of the Environment grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

The Fetal Basis of Adult Disease: Role of the Environment: This PA replaces PAR-03-121. It is recognized that between two-percent and five-percent of all live-born infants have a major developmental defect. Approximately 40 percent of these defects are thought to be due to the effect(s) of an adverse exposure of a genetically pre-disposed fetus to intra-uterine environmental factors. It is now clear that in many cases the fetus is more sensitive than the adult to the same environmental insults. Exposure to environmental agents during early development can result in death, structural malformation, and/or functional alteration of the embryo/fetus. These toxicant-induced pathogenic responses are most likely the result of altered gene expression associated with altered cell production and cell differentiation involved in the establishment of cell lineages leading to the structural and functional character of the tissues, organs, and systems that arise from these lineages. The NIEHS has a significant program that addresses the role of developmental exposures on structural malformations i.e., classical birth defects and on functional alterations whose effects are readily observable early in development. The purpose of this program announcement with a set aside of funds and a Special Emphasis Panel review by the NIH Center for Scientific Review is to stimulate research in an important and emerging area of developmental toxicology: the effects of in utero exposures that cause permanent functional changes that are not overtly, grossly teratogenic yet that result in increased susceptibility to disease/dysfunction later in the life span. This program announcement seeks to encourage the application of the new high-throughput functional-genomic, metabonomic, proteomic, and bioinformatic technologies to pursue an understanding of these latent effects of in utero environmental insult.