( The Translational Genomics Research Ins...)TGen awarded $7.1 million to accelerate brain disease research

The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) today announced the receipt of a $7.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue a project designed to uncover the genetic causes of neurological and mental health disorders using sophisticated genetic scanning technologies. This award is part of a greater $25 million grant that TGen will share with three other microarray centers that are part of the NIH Neuroscience Microarray Consortium supported by the NIH Neuroscience Blueprint (http://neuroscienceblueprint.nih.gov).

The Microarray Consortium was initially funded in 2002 by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS; www.ninds.nih.gov) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH; www.nimh.nih.gov). The new award is supported by these two institutes as well as the thirteen other NIH Neuroscience Blueprint institutes. The consortium combines technology resources from TGen, Duke University in Durham, NC, and the University of California in Los Angeles. Because of the consortium's success and an expanding need for consortium services in neuroscience, a fourth research center, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, will be added to the program in June.

About 10,000 investigators from the 15 different NIH institutes that are part of the NIH Neuroscience Blueprint will have access to the technology and expertise within the consortium. These investigators will be able to further their research through the use of microarray technology used for scanning through the entire human genome (3 billion letters) and all of the genes for which it encodes (30,000-40,000 genes).

"The application of the newest and most sophisticated genome scanning technologies will allow us to unlock the mysteries of how the brain functions normally, as well as what causes common human disorders like Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and others," said Dr. Dietrich A. Stephan, Director of the Neurogenomics D
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Source:The Translational Genomics Research Institute

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