Science Market Update

As early as February of 2012, project organizers plan on opening the New York Genome Center, a new center for genomics and medicine, in Manhattan. NYGC’s collaborating members include a number of public and private contributors, among them 11 academic institutions, private philanthropists, technology collaborators, the New York City Economic Corporation and the New York City Investment Fund. In total, contributing members have donated $120 million to the project so far.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) recently released a quarterly financial report that showed solid growth for Western Pennsylvania's largest health care provider and one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the US.  It also announced that it will be begin construction on a $300M facility to house its nascent Center for Innovative Science, which "will bring together leading scientists willing to develop bold, new approaches to understanding complex diseases," according to UPMC's president.  In conjunction with its academic partner, the University of Pittsburgh, UPMC is already recruiting nationally for "a scientific leader in genetics and genomics" to head the center.

The Center for Human Genome Variation (CHGV) at Duke University School of Medicine has just received a $25M grant to lead a 5-year, international study to identify the genetic basis of human epilepsy. The grant was awarded as part of a genetics of epilepsy "Center without Walls" initiative funded by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS) to a team of leaders in epilepsy and human genetics from around the world.  Heading that team is Dr. David Goldstein, who is a professor of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, professor of Biology, and director of the CHGV at Duke. 

Michael E. Zwick is a geneticist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and his recently published study in October's Genomics journal on Identifying Autism Susceptibility Genes explores a new PCR technology for rapid, targeted, and highly accurate sequencing and identification of novel genetic variants affecting X chromosome genes.  Autism is four times more common in men, who possess only one copy of the X chromosome, and Zwick's research explores this possible correlation.

Following up on our much-read April 2011 blog on Biomedical Building News at UCSD, we are pleased to report that the following UCSD medical facilities have celebrated their grand openings:

The NIH recently awarded more than $110M in research funding for the second phase of the Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP), a phenotyping project involving an international consortium of researchers (the IKMC) who will generate about 5,000 strains of knockout mice that will undergo a large battery of clinical phenotype tests to reveal how traits are affected by deleting a given gene in an individual mouse. 

Knockout mice are genetically customized mice that have individual genes turned off or have a gene ramped up, to make them either more prone or more resistant to specific diseases.

In perhaps the crowning achievement of a decade of work, a group of Harvard University researchers have identified the specific protein responsible for calcium absorption in mitochondria, solving a long-standing and crucial problem for our understanding of an essential cellular component.

The NIH has just announced that the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) consortium of seven US medical research institutions has received an additional $25M in funding for Phase II of a series of projects to study how genetic information in patients' medical records can be used to improve their care.  As genome sequencing becomes increasingly affordable and more widely done, translational research is needed to show physicians how they might respond to indicators of genetic predisposition to disease in their treatment programs.  The eMERGE network was formed in 2007 "to develop, disseminate, and apply approaches to research that combine DNA biorepositories with electronic medical record (EMR) systems for large-scale, high-throughput genetic research," according to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) branch of the NIH.

According to Richard Resnick, CEO of GenomeQuest: "The world has completely changed and none of you know about it." 

A team of Genomics Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle have recently uncovered several sporadic gene mutations in the protein producing areas of the genome, called the exome, that may be linked to autism spectrum disorders. The scientists used the latest molecular biology techniques as well as parallel sequencing to simultaneously examine the exomes of several children with a certain form of autism.