NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Seattle's Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit medical research organization, will use a grant of $6.7 million from the National Cancer Institute to establish a new interdisciplinary research and training center, Sage said today.
Funded under the NCI's Integrative Cancer Biology Program (ICBP) the center will conduct genomics and other biomedical research, and will support training of four postdoctoral researchers each year.
Sage also will collaborate with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, The Johns Hopkins University, The Dana Farber Cancer Institute, The University of Hong Kong, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, and other ICBP Centers.
Sage Bionetworks President Stephen Friend said in a statement that the grant "is a wonderful endorsement for our young organization and validates our vision to establish a contractor-based integrative genomics and network biology resource to accelerate drug development."
The research projects initially will focus on breast, colon, liver, and pancreatic cancer, and the computational models developed will be validated in the laboratory to test their accuracy and refine their models.
"Sage was established based on three themes; biomedical research, integrative genomics platform building and training," Jonathan Derry, Sage's research director, added. "This new NCI Center represents the first component of our training mission."