Armed with a $400,000 grant, a University of Hawaii researcher is launching a new initiative to find ways to prevent the transmission of the Zika virus between pregnant women and the fetus they carry.

The National Institutes of Health grant will allow UH John A. Burns School of Medicine assistant professor Mukesh Kumar, an expert in infectious diseases, to further investigate Zika virus infection and disease in pregnancy and to develop means of protecting the offspring of infected mothers.

Kumar recently discovered that guinea pigs can be infected by a recent American strain of the virus, a discovery that suggests that studying Zika in guinea pigs could lead to new insight into how Zika affects humans.

“We want to understand how the Zika virus is transmitted to the fetus, how the virus affects pregnancies and how Zika infection can impair infants, causing developmental delays and physical disorders,” Kumar said in a release issued Saturday.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Zika can cause serious brain damage and microcephaly (smaller-­than-average head size) in developing fetuses, as well as brain abnormalities, vision problems, hearing loss and problems with motor skills.

A CDC study found that nearly 10 percent of pregnant women in the United States with confirmed Zika infection had a fetus or baby with Zika-related birth defects. The study further indicated that confirmed infections in the first trimester posed the highest risk, with about 15 percent resulting in Zika-related birth defects.

The first baby born with Zika virus in the United States was delivered in an Oahu hospital in 2016. The child was born with microcephaly.

The mother likely had the mosquito-borne virus while living in Brazil, and her newborn acquired the infection in the womb, according to the state Department of Health.

Hawaii is considered at higher risk for transmission of the virus because of its year-round tropical climate and high volume of international visitors.