Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

NIH to Fund Development of Informatics Tools for Druggable Genome Research

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.

The Scan

Tara Pacific Expedition Project Team Finds High Diversity Within Coral Reef Microbiome

In papers appearing in Nature Communications and elsewhere, the team reports on findings from the two-year excursion examining coral reefs.

Study Examines Relationship Between Cellular Metabolism, DNA Damage Repair

A new study in Molecular Systems Biology finds that an antioxidant enzyme shifts from mitochondria to the nucleus as part of the DNA damage response.

Stem Cell Systems Target Metastatic Melanoma in Mouse Model

Researchers in Science Translational Medicine describe a pair of stem cell systems aimed at boosting immune responses against metastatic melanoma in the brain.

Open Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas Team Introduces Genomic Data Collection, Analytical Tools

A study in Cell Genomics outlines open-source methods being used to analyze and translate whole-genome, exome, and RNA sequence data from the Pediatric Brain Tumor Atlas.