Seattle Children's Hospital leads $23.7 million NIH grant to study g...( SEATTLE: Sept. 6 2007 Seattle Child...)

SEATTLE: Sept. 6, 2007 Seattle Childrens Hospital will receive the largest research grant in its 100-year history for a new five-year, eleven-part grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study gene repair. The $23.7 million grant will support the Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium, led by Andrew M. Scharenberg, MD, of Seattle Childrens Hospital Research Institute in partnership with the University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM) and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Approximately $13.2 million will be directly awarded to Childrens, with $5.3 million going to UWSOM and $5.2 million to the Hutchinson Center.

The project is funded by the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, a new type of NIH grant program designed to address especially complex problems in research that require expertise across multiple scientific disciplines. This large award comes fresh on the heels of Childrens Hospital being ranked ninth in the nation among the countrys top pediatric hospitals, at a time when Childrens is significantly expanding its research agenda, facilities and staff. During the past year Childrens has acquired nearly four acres and 1.5 million developable-square feet of research property in downtown Seattles prime biotech corridor.

The Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium (NGEC) is collaborative research composed of 11 different projects that will build upon each other to develop methods for gene repair, an innovative approach to gene therapy. Gene repair involves manipulating defective sequences of DNA in a targeted gene to change them to the correct sequence, restoring the gene to normal function and eliminating the cause of the patients inherited disease. Gene repair requires multiple scientific disciplines to generate new kinds of proteins that can perform the required manipulations and then deliver them to a patients diseased tissues.

With this research we hope to develop new and efficient approaches for gene repa
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