The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded the Children’s Respiratory and Environmental Workgroup (CREW) $68,808,597 for five years to continue collecting standardized data from 10 birth cohorts around the country to better understand environmental causes of allergic diseases and asthma.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison serves as CREW’s Administrative Center and Biomedical Informatics and Biostatistical Center. The multicenter project is a collaboration between investigators in the UW Department of Pediatrics (PI James Gern, MD; co-investigators Christine Seroogy, MD; Daniel Jackson, MD; Robert Lemanske, MD; Anne Marie Singh, MD; and project manager Gina Crisafi) and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (Umberto Tachinardi, MD; Mark Craven, PhD; Eneida Mendonca, MD, PhD; and Robert Lemanske, MD).
CREW is part of the NIH Environment and Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) consortium, and will also collect information about obesity, neurocognitive development and perinatal outcomes. The application was supported by additional funding from the UW Department of Pediatrics, the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, the UW Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and the UW-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education.