NEW YORK, Sept. 6 – Celera Genomics has partnered with the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in an $11.6 million NIH-funded program to research SNP-associated variations in response to high blood pressure treatment, the organizations announced Thursday.
The four-year funding from the NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute will support UCSD DNA sample collection from more than 800 hypertensive and clinically normal patients. The samples will be sent to Celera for SNP identification and genotyping. Researchers at UCSD will then look for associations between identified genetic variants and particular drug responses in each individual patient.
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
"We are very pleased that Celera and the clinical researchers at UCSD can work together to begin understanding how variations in the human genome can help explain why these kinds of differences exist and how to harness them so physicians can treat individual patients and not statistical averages," Craig Venter, president of Celera, said in a statement.
The UCSD project is part of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences NIH Pharmacogenetics Research Network and Knowledge Base, which oversees investigations at UCSD and 13 other research centers. The program includes the Pharmacogenetics Research Network, a shared information library called "PharmGKB," into which network researchers deposit collected results. The library’s contents are accessible to all scientists, according to UCSD.