ECHO Cohort Ancillary Studies
Announcements and Important Dates
At this time, the NIH ECHO Program Office has temporarily paused all requests to use children's shed teeth from the ECHO Biorepository, including for ancillary studies.
The Program Office is hosting a virtual workshop titled Maximizing the Potential of Shed Teeth on April 22, 2026, from 10:00am - 4:15pm ET. This virtual workshop will bring together leading experts to discuss how to efficiently, rigorously, and collaboratively assay biospecimens like shed teeth across multiple studies—ensuring this finite resource generates the greatest possible scientific value. Learn more at https://echochildren.org/maximizing-the-potential-of-shed-teeth/.
Due dates for Letter of Support Requests
ECHO accepts requests for letters of support in rounds, three times per year. There are multiple steps, so ECHO recommends that you start preparing your requests for Letters of Support as soon as possible.
| ECHO Ancillary Study Round | Start submitting brief proposal descriptions to the Program Office |
Final dates to submit brief proposal descriptions to the Program Office |
Due Date for Requesting a Letter of Support |
| 2026 Round 1 | February 09, 2026 | February 12, 2026 | March 03, 2026 |
| 2026 Round 2 | June 01, 2026 | June 04, 2026 | June 17, 2026 |
| 2026 Round 3 | October 16, 2026 | October 22, 2026 | November 05, 2026 |
The ECHO Cohort as a Research Resource
The ECHO Cohort, part of the NIH ECHO Program, seeks to understand the effects of a broad range of early environmental influences on child health and development.
ECHO makes data available to the broad scientific community in two different ways, one of which is through ancillary studies process (defined below). The other way is by using ECHO Cohort de-identified data through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Data and Specimen Hub (DASH).
Application to obtain data from DASH requires fewer steps than the ECHO Cohort ancillary studies process, but the number of participants and the amount of data are also fewer, and no access to ECHO biospecimens exists via DASH.
Learn more on this page.
NOTE: In May 2025, NICHD began the process of migrating DASH to a new platform. For the next several months, the DASH website will be unable to support new submissions, requests, or downloads. However, researchers can still view metadata from the website or via ECHO tools (see Step 1 below).
ECHO Cohort Ancillary Studies
ECHO defines an ancillary study as one that uses ECHO Cohort identifiable data, with or without ECHO biospecimens, and that requires non-ECHO funding. As such, ECHO does not consider studies that are possible with the DASH dataset to be ancillary studies.
If the study is not possible through DASH, eligible investigators and their research teams from inside and outside of ECHO can propose ancillary studies of non-publicly available data with limited personal identifiers from the ECHO Cohort Data Platform, with or without biospecimens from the ECHO Biorepository.
A wide range of analyses are possible with an ECHO Cohort ancillary study.
Examples include, but are not limited, to:
- Detecting modifiable early developmental exposures that, if addressed by programs, policies, and practices, could enhance child health outcomes across the life course.
- Exploring pathways to child health outcomes that incorporate state-of-the-art analytic biochemical or statistical methods.
- Examining resilience or susceptibility factors that buffer or amplify the effects of adverse early exposures on child health outcomes.
- Identifying periods of development most sensitive to specific beneficial or detrimental exposures to inform new strategies to promote child health.
- Measuring the effects of natural experiments or new health innovations or paradigms on child health outcomes.
Eligibility for an ECHO Cohort ancillary study
To request and utilize ECHO Cohort data, with or without biospecimens, investigators and their institutions must have registered accounts through the System for Award Management, eRA Commons, and grants.gov.
Requesters must attest that their local Institutional Review Board or Independent Ethics Committee has reviewed their proposal for an ECHO Cohort ancillary study.
ECHO Cohort policies that ancillary studies must follow
All ancillary studies must adhere to the following policies of the ECHO Cohort Consortium:
Questions?
See frequently asked questions here.
Contact the ECHO Cohort Coordinating Center with any other questions.
How to Apply
This figure depicts the necessary steps to apply for an ECHO Cohort ancillary study, and we describe the steps in the following paragraphs.
The ECHO Cohort Data Analysis Center provides a search tool called PlatIPUS for exploring the non-publicly available ECHO Cohort data potentially available for an ECHO Cohort ancillary study.
Request access to PlatIPUS and then use the platform to search the data and biospecimens options.
You must include a screenshot of your final search result in your request for a letter of support (see #3 below).
Note: PlatIPUS also provides metadata for the de-identified ECHO Cohort data on the NICHD DASH platform to help you decide if they are sufficient for your proposed analysis.
Conducting Your Ancillary Study
This figure depicts the steps you will take to conduct your ECHO Cohort ancillary study once funding and your ECHO X01 are in place. We describe the steps in the following paragraphs.
After you have received your funding (and an NIH ECHO X01 if needed), contact the ECHO Cores and Centers associated with your project to set up user accounts and payment processes.
ECHO Coordinating Center: echocc-ancillarystudy@duke.edu
ECHO Data Analysis Center: echo-help@rti.org
ECHO Laboratory Core: elvis_pub@vumc.org
ECHO Measurement Core: echomeasurement@northwestern.edu
Questions?
See frequently asked questions here.
Contact the ECHO Cohort Coordinating Center with any other questions by email at echocc-ancillarystudy@duke.edu.