Healthy Brain and Child Development National Consortium Data Coordinating Center

PROJECT SUMMARY The landmark Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) study will provide a representative reference data resource to the scientific community enabling unprecedented investigation of neurodevelopment and the impact of environmental, genetic, and biological factors on brain and behavioral health and developmental trajectories from infancy through childhood. Through this study, the HBCD Consortium will recruit and retain a sociodemographically diverse cohort of 7,200 pregnant women from 24 U01 sites (and three additional subcontract sites for 27 total data collection sites) across the U.S. and follow these families and their children through the first decade of life. Children will undergo rigorous data collection across modalities including neuroimaging, neurophysiology, behavioral and cognitive assessments, and collection of biospecimens via a study protocol developed by field-leading experts. The Healthy Brain and Child Development Data Coordinating Center (HDCC; U24 DA055330) provides the leadership, management, and oversight of data collection, quality control, curation, processing, management, sharing, and analytics to facilitate and support the activities of the HBCD Consortium and ensure its success. This administrative supplement is necessary to accommodate costs unbudgeted in the original submission required to support the successful and coordinated collection, processing, analysis, and integration of toxicology data across three biospecimen types – nails, urine, and blood – into standard study workflows in direct support of activities central to the primary study aims. Study protocols have been refined to accommodate specimen quantity limitations, maximize analyte detection, and ensure harmonized data transformation across sites for research utility. These data will then be linked directly with the HDCC public distribution tools to facilitate coordinated release in combination with both main and ancillary study data. The result of this field-leading investigation will be a state-of-the-art, longitudinal data set of unparalleled scale which provides deep understanding of the biological and environmental factors that affect a child’s health, brain, and behavioral development and shapes research, clinical care, and public policy for decades to come. This study is part of the NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative to speed scientific solutions to the national opioid public health crisis. The NIH HEAL Initiative bolsters research across NIH to improve treatment for opioid misuse and addiction.