NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Four collaborative research teams have reeled in $1 million from the Institute for Systems Genomics at the University of Connecticut to pursue genome-focused, interdisciplinary biomedical research projects, UConn said today.
Each winner of the the project groups, which UConn calls the Affinity Research Collaboratives, will receive $50,000 per year for five years to engage in genomics research that incorporates at least two disciplines and consists of teams of at least four investigators with representation at both UConn and the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine.
In one of the projects, researchers at UConn, Jackson, and the Connecticut Children's Medical Center will study the impacts of stress on the gut microbiome in newborns and infants who are born pre-term.
Another effort involving UConn, CCMC, the University of Connecticut Health Center, and Jackson will focus on the toxic side-effects of chemotherapy by looking to discover genetic variants, biomarkers, and mechanisms of drug toxicity using animal models.
A project involving investigators at UConn and Jackson will aim to understand how chromatin interactions, epigenomics, and transcriptional responses to drug induction, with the goal of predicting the efficacy of therapies and potential adverse drug reactions that can happen when patients take multiple drugs together.
In another project, researchers at UConn, Jackson, CCMC, and UCHC will partner to find out more about how neuronal dysfunction is involved in autism spectrum disorders and to develop an integrated method for using stem cells and mouse models to study ASD in children.
The Institute for Systems Genomics, which was launched last fall, will officially kick off these ARC projects at a symposium in September.