National Institutes of Health funds new center for reproduction and infertility research at Illinois

The Advisory Council of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has approved funding to support a Center for Reproduction and Infertility Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This Center will support research aimed at expanding the science underlying the success or failure of human reproduction with the goal of improving human reproductive health.

The NICHD supports a national network of Centers of Excellence through a program called the Specialized Centers Program in Reproduction and Infertility Research.

Currently, this national network of Centers is located at 14 sites across the country (for more information, visit http://www.nichd.nih.gov/research/supported/SCCPIR.cfm). The new center would be funded for five years starting in 2008 with a projected budget of about $8 million dollars.

The Center for Reproduction and Infertility Research will support a multidisciplinary research team with a common goal of understanding the mechanisms that control maternal-fetal interactions during early pregnancy and to identify factors that underlie infertility in women suffering from endometriosis, a common gynecologic disorder.

The multidisciplinary team will draw expertise from the U. of I. School of Molecular and Cellular Biology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the department of veterinary biosciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Clinicians from the Emory University Medical School in Atlanta, GA, and a molecular geneticist from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, will also contribute to the effort.