NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The University of Pennsylvania Medical School announced yesterday that it has established the Penn Neurodegeneration Genomics Center (PNGC), which will coordinate the activities of a number of National Institutes of Health initiatives in Alzheimer's disease research.
According to Penn Medicine, the PNGC will coordinate the efforts of several of the agency's Alzheimer's disease centers — including the AD Genetics Consortium, the Consortium for AD Sequence Analysis, and the Coordinating Center for Genetics/Genomics of AD — as well as the National Institute on Aging's Genetics of AD storage facility. These centers, located at Penn and elsewhere, are involved in developing new patient cohorts, coordinating analyses, and disseminating data and findings on the genetics of Alzheimer's disease.
Penn Medicine said that it has received $24 million from the NIH over several years to support its efforts as part of these national collaborations.
"The center will strengthen ties between multiple investigators working on not only Alzheimer's disease, but also on the genetics of other neurodegenerative diseases," PNGC Co-director Gerard Schellenberg said in a statement. "The center will also interact with other campus investigators working with large-scale DNA sequence data sets to make Penn a national center for genomic-based disease research."