As part of the France 2030 plan, the government has decided to strengthen the capacity of medical research by launching the 3rd wave of the call for projects for the creation of 7 new IHU.
The winner of this call for projects, the Institut Robert-Debré du Cerveau de l’Enfant, founded in 2021 by a partnership between AP-HP, Inserm, Université Paris Cité, CEA and Institut Pasteur, will be endowed with 20 million euros to create a new ecosystem bringing together children, families, doctors, researchers, institutions and private partners to act together in the face of neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities in children.
This project, which will be supported by the AP-HP, was eagerly awaited, given the major public health issues surrounding children's cognitive development (one child in six suffers from neurodevelopmental disorders, one child in five has learning difficulties, and one child in five lives below the poverty line).
The three main objectives of the Institut Robert-Debré du Cerveau de l’Enfant are as follows:
- Understand how the brain functions and learns during a critical phase of cerebral plasticity (from the fetus to age 6) and identify risk and resilience factors.
- Use predictive models to describe individual neurodevelopmental trajectories and discover new drugs and remediation strategies;
- Create a new preventive health and education model dedicated to children, notably via a digital platform to improve early identification and access to care, as well as offering new digital resources. This platform will also be aimed at families and health and childhood education professionals, and will enable the collection of longitudinal and ecological data from several thousand children with diverse neurodevelopmental trajectories.
The medical and scientific sponsors of this project are :
- Prof. Pierre Gressens, Director, UMR 1141 Inserm-Université Paris Cité, Hôpital Robert Debré AP-HP
- Prof. Richard Delorme, Professor at Université Paris Cité, Head of the Child Psychiatry Department at Hôpital Robert-Debré AP-HP and researcher at Institut Pasteur
- Prof. Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Director of the Developmental Neuroimaging Laboratory at Neurospin (CNRS/CEA/Inserm/Université Paris-Saclay).
- Prof. Thomas Bourgeron, Professor at Université Paris Cité and Director of Research at Institut Pasteur
Marianne Perreau-Saussine, hospital director (AP-HP), is in charge of executive management.