Central Michigan University Awarded 8 Research Grants from the NIH to study MIS-C

The National Institutes of Health has awarded eight research grants to Central Michigan University for developing an approach for identifying children at high risk for Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), a rare and severe after-effect of COVID-19 or exposure to the virus that causes it.

About $20 million will be provided for the projects over four years, pending the availability of funds.

Following are the names of Awardees and the project names.

1. Jane C. Burns, University of California, San Diego
   Diagnosing and predicting risk in children with SARS-CoV-2- related illness
2. Cedric Manlhiot, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
   A data science approach to identify and manage MIS-C associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and Kawasaki disease in pediatric patients
3. Ananth V. Annapragada, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston
   Artificial intelligence COVID-19 risk assessment for kids
4. Audrey R. Odom John, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
   Diagnosis of MIS-C in febrile children
5. Usha Sethuraman, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant
   Severity predictors integrating salivary transcriptomics and proteomics with multi neural network intelligence in SARS-CoV2 infection in children
6. Juan C. Salazar, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Hartford
   Identifying biomarker signatures of prognostic value for MIS-C
7. Charles Yen Chiu, University of California, San Francisco
   Discovery and clinical validation of host biomarkers of disease severity and MIS-C with Covid-19
8. Lawrence Kleinman, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, New Jersey
   COVID-19 Network of Networks Expanding Clinical and Translational approaches to Predict Severe Illness in Children

Children develop mild to no symptoms when infected with SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Some may develop a rare condition MIS-C, which causes inflammation of one or more organs (heart, lung, kidney, brain, skin, eyes). The NIH awards will enable further studies and will explore how genetic, immune, viral, environmental, and other factors influence the severity of COVID-19 in children and the chances of progression to MIS-C and other long-term complications.