NEW YORK — The National Human Genome Research Institute announced today that it has awarded $3 million in funding to six investigators under its Genomic Innovator Awards program.
Launched in 2018, the program is designed to help early-career investigators who have primarily worked within groups pursuing independent research. The latest awards are worth approximately $500,000 each over five years.
"NHGRI could not be more pleased to announce awards that will help talented investigators pursue their research ideas in a highly nimble fashion," NHGRI Director Eric Green said in a statement. "All awards have enormous potential to make meaningful contributions to genomics in the coming years."
Award recipients include the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, who is developing technologies to improve mouse model development and breeding; Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Eric Gamazon, who is developing computational tools to analyze the physical characteristics of medical conditions with the goal of better understanding the role of genomic variation in disease risk; and Jason Vassy of Harvard Medical School, who is developing polygenic risk scores for six common diseases, including certain cancers, that can be used in point-of-care testing.
Other awardees include Massachusetts General Hospital's Luca Pinello, who is investigating the function of regulatory elements and how their mutation can contribute to disease; Stacy Gray of the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, who is developing a web-based point-of-care tool to help physicians and patients interpret genomic information; and University of Maryland, Baltimore's Timothy O'Connor, who is identifying genomic variants within specific ancestry populations to understand their role in disease.