NIH Commits More than $14M to Broad Institute for National SNP Genotyping Center

NEW YORK, Oct. 5 (GenomeWeb News) - The National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of Health said today that it has awarded more than $14 million over five years to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, towards the development of a national center for high-throughput genotyping.

The institute, the first of its kind in the US, will serve as a resource for researchers to conduct large-scale studies of SNPs in humans and animals to advance disease gene identification, according to an official statement.

Stacey Gabriel will be the center's principal investigator and director. Gabriel currently oversees the Broad Institute's genetic analysis platform, and is scientific director of the Broad Institute's portion of the International HapMap Project.

The Broad Institute will offer a variety of services for the selection, discovery, and analysis of SNPs, based on three technology platforms: Sequenom's MassArray, Illumina's BeadLab, and Affymetrix' GeneChip, according to Gabriel.

A portion of the center's annual budget will be used to partially support compelling genotyping research projects, to be selected by a steering committee, the Broad Institute said. The first genotyping studies at the new center will be performed in early 2005, and the center will be taking applications for subsidized research later this fall. Researchers interested in accessing the resource should contact the Broad Institute directly.