Our Network

Who We Are

We are the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network (RDCRN), an initiative of the Division of Rare Diseases Research Innovation (DRDRI) within the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). We are funded by NCATS and collaborating institutes and centers.

Our mission is to advance medical research on rare diseases by providing support for clinical studies and facilitating collaboration, study enrollment and data sharing. Through the RDCRN consortia, physician scientists and their multidisciplinary teams work together with patient advocacy groups to study nearly 200 rare diseases at sites across the nation.

Our Goals

Rare diseases come with many challenges. Some diseases are not well characterized or defined, recruitment for trials can be difficult, high-quality evidence to guide treatments is scarce, and very few expert centers are available for diagnosis, management, and research. Our goal is to facilitate clinical research by creating rare diseases research groups to focus on related diseases, sharing the costs of our research infrastructures across the network, establish uniform studies for data collection, and making meaningful large-scale studies possible. We also directly engage with patients and their advocates, and train new investigators in rare diseases research.