Political Quotes

“I wish to celebrate the passage of the National Pediatric Research Network Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that was signed into law last month. I wish to thank my colleague, Senator Sherrod Brown, for his leadership on this issue. I was pleased to work with him on this important initiative in the previous two Congresses. The National Pediatric Research Network Act expands and enhances our Nation's commitment to pediatric research by providing the infrastructure that is needed to advance the field for decades to come. To do so, the law includes training and support for early-career investigators and authorizes the National Institutes of Health to select a number of competitive pediatric research consortia. Each consortium, comprised of multiple institutions, will focus on specific, high-impact pediatric research, including basic, translational, and clinical investigations. In addition, the law specifically states that a subset of the consortia must focus primarily on pediatric rare diseases. Participating institutions are encouraged to coordinate with multi-site clinical trials of pediatric patient populations. This will provide needed support for the families of children suffering from rare diseases, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the most common fatal genetic disorder diagnosed in childhood, and spinal muscular atrophy, the leading genetic killer of children under the age of 2.…”