NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The National Institutes of Health has earmarked $2 million in fiscal 2019 to fund efforts to build new informatics tools that can be used to better understand the functions of understudied proteins in the druggable genome.
In 2014, the NIH launched the Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) program, a pilot project investigating the approximately 3,000 genes — including ion channels, protein kinases, and non-olfactory G-protein coupled receptors — that express proteins that can be altered by drugs.
To help advance the IDG, the NIH is now soliciting applications to build sets of cutting-edge informatics tools that will enhance the ability of program members to process, analyze, and visualize data; that can be incorporated into IDG's Pharos knowledge portal to strengthen predictions about physiological and disease associations around the understudied proteins; and can help prioritize understudied proteins for deeper study using experimental assays.
Funding recipients are expected to work together across the different IDG initiatives to help accomplish its overall goals and to disseminate resources developed by them to the broader scientific community, the NIH said. Projects are expected to involve building and experimentally validating predictive models for use by IDG members and the broader research community, and/or building new visualizations for navigating complex data.
Additional details about the funding opportunity can be found here.