NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The National Institute of General Medical Sciences plans to fund efforts to develop new resources that investigators focused on pharmacogenomics can use to speed up their research activities or to implement them into practice.
The National Institutes of Health said in a funding announcement today that these enabling resources will provide activities, services, platforms, or methods that meet specific scientific needs and will benefit the entire pharmacogenomics research field.
These new resources will become part of the Pharmacogenomics Research Network (PGRN), beginning as early as next year. PGRN, which launched in 2000, is an NIH-funded network of science groups working together on research projects, collaborations, and partnerships that aim to advance the use of genomics in making drug-based therapies more effective and safer.
Last year, the National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council recommended that PGRN transition into the regular research grant funding stream as of 2015, so only limited specialized funding opportunities will be available under a transition plan through the Pharmacogenomics in Precision Medicine program.
The efforts funded under the new NIGMS grants will help researchers conduct their pharmacogenomics research and will help them implement and disseminate those discoveries. However, NIGMS has not specified funding amounts for these grants, which will support projects for up to three years.
These projects will develop collections of research tools, reference materials, statistical and analytical methods, or cellular models (such as induced pluripotent stem cells that recapitulate germ-line sequence variation). These resources also will benefit larger bodies of researchers that are working on pharmacogenomics research projects, such as the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium, or in drug-specific consortia focused on pharmacogenomics, or pharmacogenomics-specific platforms for sequencing, such as PGRN-seq or PGx-seq.