The next frontier in the genome sciences will be developing technology that captures novel quantitative biological measurements ... more about genomics
The Penn Genome Frontiers Institute solicited proposals from the Penn community in the Spring of 2010 for its new initiative: Partnerships in Translational and Personalized Genomics. The results of this solicitation are detailed below. (6/23/10)
Recent advances in technology have radically lowered the costs and increased the speed of genome sequencing such that within the next five years, decoding the genome of any patient will be as common place as diagnostic X-ray. Because of the massive amounts of data generated from such Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), genome science is undergoing a second revolution. To facilitate and participate in this revolution, the Penn Genome Frontier Institute (PGFI) is pleased to announce the establishment of two internal centers for large-scale projects targeting translational and personalized genomics. These centers are the Center for Translational and Personalized Genomics of NSAIDs (PI: G. FitzGerald) and the Center for Translational and Personalized Genomics of Inherited Retinal Degenerations (PI: E. Pierce; as of Sept. 2011, the PI is J. Bennett). The two centers were selected by an external peer review process from an open proposal solicitation to the Penn community. The PGFI will invest a total of $5 million over three years in NGS equipment ($2 M) and projects ($3 M) focusing on applications of NGS to health and disease.
The competition revealed a great need for NGS technology access at Penn and the PGFI will provide pilot funding ($200 K over three years) for five other projects. These projects tackle challenging problems in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (PIs: M. Reilly, D. Rader), African integrative genomics (PI: S. Tishkoff), ocular cancers (PI: A. Ganguly), autism spectrum disorders (PIs: M. Bucan, T. Abel), and cancer genomics (PIs: M. Lemmon, J. Maris).