NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The New York Genome Center has won $13.5 million under the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program, the center said today.
The TOPMed program plans to combine whole-genome sequencing and other omics data, such as metabolic, protein expression, and RNA expression data, with molecular, behavioral, imaging, environmental, and clinical data from studies focused on heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders. The goal is to discover risk factors for the diseases, identify subtypes, and develop targeted treatments.
The program is starting with a whole-genome sequencing project involving individuals with well-defined clinical phenotypes and outcomes from earlier NHLBI-funded studies, which is expected to develop into a larger initiative.
The NYGC has already sequenced and analyzed 1,500 human genomes for the TOPMed program and will expand this effort with the new funding.
To support this and other projects, the center recently purchased four additional Illumina HiSeq X Ten instruments, bringing its total to 14. By the end of this year, it expects to have sequenced more than 10,000 human genomes.
The Broad Institute is also participating in the TOPMed project— the institute said earlier this month that it won $40 million from NHLBI to sequence 20,000 individuals under the program.