NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Center for Applied Genomics at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto has received part of a CAD$870,000 ($846,000) grant from the non-profit Wellcome Trust to develop new diagnostic and therapeutic tools for childhood diseases, according to the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation.
Sharing the grant with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute, SickKids specifically plans to use the funds to expand its work on the Database of Genomic Variants — also called the Toronto Database — which houses structural and copy number variation data.
The MRI said today that the researchers at SickKids will collect, organize, and curate genome-wide information for use in developing new prognostic, diagnostic, and therapeutic tools for children’s health.
“The biological importance of copy number variability is clear, only three years following its discovery,” Alan Schafer, head of molecular and physiological sciences at the Wellcome Trust, said in a statement. “With the technology now available to discover CNV regions at an unprecedented resolution, CNV research will be greatly facilitated by this database.”