Posted on January 12, 2004 at 2:32 p.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Researchers at the UAB Civitan International Research Center will be part of a new multi-center Rare Diseases Clinical Research Center (RDCRC) to study three rare diseases — Rett, Angelman and Prader-Willi syndromes. The center is funded by a $6.25 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“The center will help develop an understanding of how these diseases affect individuals throughout their lives and set the stage for studying treatments that may help reduce the effects of such diseases,” said Dr. Alan Percy, associate director of the Civitan Center and a leading international authority on Rett syndrome. “The grant is intended to interface with the UAB General Clinical Research Center and the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Center.

Dr. Arthur Beaudet, chair of the Baylor College of Medicine department of molecular and human genetics and the principal investigator in the study, says the grant will promote clinical research into these disorders that are “often neglected because they affect a small percentage of the population.” He anticipates that the focus of the center will expand to other disorders in the coming years.

The UAB center is one of seven to receive funding from the Office of Rare Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. In addition to UAB and Baylor, other collaborating participants are San Diego Children’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, the University of Florida at Gainesville, the University of California-Irvine and the Greenwood Genetics Center in South Carolina.