NEW YORK – The National Institutes of Health has awarded $12.5 million to researchers across multiple institutions to create an integrated database to support pancreas and diabetes research.
With the funding, which comes in the form of two five-year awards, the researchers are planning to establish the Pancreas KnowledgeBase (PanKbase) to help organize, standardize, and disseminate existing data and resources related to the human pancreas.
The PanKbase team includes researchers from the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt University, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Weill Cornell Medicine, the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, the University of California San Diego, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Broad Institute, with input from program officers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Together, they will leverage platforms such as the Common Metabolic Diseases Knowledge Portal (CMDKP), Common Metabolic Diseases Genome Atlas, Pancreatlas, and Genomic Knowledgebase (GenomicKB) to curate data across multiple modalities, including human genetics, genomics, human islet physiology, and spatial pancreatic tissue architecture for PanKbase.
The PanKbase program will become a component of the NIH-funded Human Islet Research Network and support the generation of new insights into molecular signatures of type 1 diabetes.