Philadelphia Regional Center for Children’s Environmental Health to be Led by Penn Medicine and CHOP
Children in Greater Philadelphia face many environmental threats to their health. These include lead poisoning, asthma from pollution and exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals. Now, with funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, researchers from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and Penn Medicine have come together to address these hazards and protect children who live in the region’s most vulnerable communities.
The Philadelphia Regional Center for Children’s Environmental Health (PRCCEH) is a new children’s center that will provide the infrastructure to integrate expertise from the two institutions, along with colleagues from Drexel University, Temple University, Thomas Jefferson University, Lehigh University, Franklin & Marshall College, Villanova University, and the University of Delaware. This is the first time that the region has been awarded funding for a center for children’s environmental health.
“The center is an outgrowth of research from Penn’s Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET), its long-term collaborators, and its community partners,” said CEET director Trevor Penning. “It has long been a vision to bring such a center to the region.”
The mission of the center is threefold: to disseminate children’s environmental health knowledge to health care providers, community members, and policy makers; to develop, test, and implement new programs; and to engage researchers and community partners to make policy, practice, and behavioral changes to reduce environmental exposures in early life. It will be directed by Rebecca Simmons (a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania) and Aimin Chen (a professor of epidemiology at Penn), as well as Marilyn Howarth (director of the Community Engagement Core in CEET).
“This center will build on years of extensive research in environmental toxicology and pediatric health at both Penn and CHOP to make real, positive change in the lives of children throughout the region,” said Dr. Simmons. “We already have many established connections within communities throughout Philadelphia, Delaware, and other counties, and this grant will allow us to strengthen and expand on those partnerships.”
The center will be focusing on four areas of primary research and translation: asthma prevention, lead harm reduction, air pollution and reducing exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals. Building on CHOP’s Community Asthma Prevention Program (CAPP)—a program designed by its Medical Director Tyra Bryant Stephens that has supported families of children with asthma in Philadelphia for more than 20 years—the center will expand the initiative to the city of Chester, providing education and supplies to help families mitigate asthma triggers in the home, with the goal of improving asthma outcomes in children.
CEET’s research revealed a significant gap in elevated blood lead levels for children depending on where they live. The new center will build on this research and use evidence-based methods to reduce lead poisoning among children. Past research from this group has also revealed that the Philadelphia-Reading-Camden Metropolitan Statistical Area is among the 25 worst for air pollution in the U.S., which has motivated the PRCCEH to address solutions to this dangerous health hazard. Finally, studies at Penn, CHOP, and other institutions worldwide show an increasing disease burden from endocrine disrupting chemicals—compounds found in household products and the environment that have been linked to preterm birth, obesity and diabetes, and neurodevelopmental disorders.