The Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) was announced in 2014 by the National Institute of Health (NIH) following the success of the Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP). The UDP receives physician referrals for some of the most complex and perplexing medical cases in the United States. After a week-long comprehensive evaluation that includes laboratory testing, imaging and diagnostic procedures, the UDP tasks NIH experts from many different subspecialties with providing a holistic understanding of each patient’s symptoms in an effort to determine a unifying diagnosis.

Similar to the UDP, the UDN is a network of medical centers across the country that is focused on the identification of conditions that have eluded a diagnosis. The UDN establishes cooperation between researchers and clinicians to help determine the underlying factors contributing to previously known and new diseases. The use of state of the art genomic sequencing and detailed phenotyping over the course of a 5-day comprehensive evaluation will provide the UDN team with extensive, patient-specific information to be used to look for an answer for the patient and family.

The UDN clinical sites are located at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas; Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts; Duke University  in Durham, North Carolina; Stanford University in Stanford, California; University of California Los Angeles in Los Angeles, California; and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.




Duke University Medical Center
The Undiagnosed Diseases Network is founded on the belief that collaborative, cutting-edge cross-disciplinary evaluation will accelerate the diagnosis of undiagnosed conditions, with the goals of helping patients and advancing our understanding of health and disease.
