NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The University of Cincinnati has received an $8.7 million grant award from the National Institutes of Health to renew funding for its Center for Environmental Genetics for five more years.
The center provides resources and support for research focused on how genetic and epigenetic factors interact with environmental agents, and how that dynamic influences disease risk and outcomes.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences funding will provide around $1.7 million per year until 2018, UC's Academic Health Center said yesterday.
The CEG is one of 20 NIEHS-funded Environmental Health Sciences Core Centers that seek to identify toxic agents in the environment and understand how they affect human health and illness.
It provides access to a range of core facilities to its 33 full members and 19 clinical members, as well as 35 affiliate and 14 associate members, including researchers from the UC College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children's Hospital who are pursuing basic, clinical, and translation science.
The center has an integrative technologies core that provides services and consultation for genome sequencing, genotyping, proteomics, flow cytometry, transgenic mouse construction, and high-field magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy.
The CEG also houses an integrative health sciences core that helps members design epidemiological research studies, clinical trials, and databases, and to acquire biospecimens, and a bioinformatics core.
In addition, the CEG awards around $200,000 annually in pilot grants to fund new environmental health research and to attract new investigators to the field, and it runs a career development program focused on developing the next generation of these investigators.
The center plans to award eight pilot research grants totaling $200,000 next month, UC said.