NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The UK's Wellcome Trust is seeking independent researchers to conduct genome-wide association disease studies building on the GWA studies it began with the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium in 2005.
The Wellcome Trust said it aims to continue the “remarkable success” the WTCCC has had in screening entire genomes in large numbers of patients to find genetic variants that could play a role in diseases. The Wellcome Trust hopes that these variants could lead to new molecular targets for prevention, diagnosis, or treatment.
International research consortia are encouraged to apply for the funding, provided they are led by an investigator based in the UK or Republic of Ireland.
The WTCCC awarded £30 million (around $46 million) in January of this year to fund 27 new studies that extended the range of diseases or traits it was investigating.
Researchers may apply for awards either in collaboration with the WTCCC or independently. All will have access to validated genotypes from 600 common controls from the UK that were typed using Illumina and Affymetrix technology. Those collaborating with the WTCCC will have access to its centralized DNA handling, quality control, genotyping, and data analysis resources.
Wellcome Trust will assess the genotyping strategy researchers plan to use and the platforms they propose using, and it wants to know how the material will be analyzed and who will conduct the analysis. It also wants to know the bioinformatics infrastructure and expertise that researchers have available for data handling.
More information about the Wellcome Trust’s call for proposals is available here.