NIDDK to Provide $20M for Diabetes GWAS

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NIDDK to Provide $20M for Diabetes GWAS
January 11, 2009
By a GenomeWeb staff reporter

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — The National Institutes of Health will pump up to $20 million over the next five years into five or six genome-wide association studies aimed at characterizing or confirming genetic associations for type 2 diabetes from the multiple ethnic groups found in the United States.

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases aims to establish a research pipeline to confirm and characterize the genetic associations for type 2 diabetes found using GWAS, and will team with the National Human Genome Research Institute to support investigators performing this research.

The “Multiethnic Study of Type 2 Diabetes Genes” program will give researchers up to $500,000 per year for as many as five years in order to build this pipeline.

Specifically, NIDDK will support researchers with expertise in human genetics and type 2 diabetes to plan, oversee, and analyze experiments; to assemble samples from multiple ethnic groups; and to isolate DNA for studies through a collaboration with the NIDDK repository. Through a collaboration with NHGRI and its sequencing centers, researchers will have access to sequencing resources and they will receive additional genotyping support.

According to NIH, GWAS so far have identified 18 genetic associations with SNPs linked to the disease, and other GWAS are “likely to identify additional associated genes.” In some of these SNPs there is a coding sequence that suggests it is likely to be a variant that could impact diabetic phenotype.

But in most cases the associated SNP is just a marker for a functional variant that has not yet been determined. Currently, NIH said, the “best way to identify the potential functional variant is to sequence the region around the SNP in multiple individuals from multiple populations.” This method can be used to identify other variants that could help to pin down the genetic target.

The aim of this initiative is to identify the causative variants for diabetes genes in multiple populations in order to allow for further research on their function and their role in the development of the disease.

Funding will support multiple researchers with access to well-characterized patients with and without diabetes from multiple racial and ethnic populations. These researchers will collaborate to design experiments to characterize functional variants that can be identified by an associated SNP from a GWAS study. They also will identify appropriate samples for further sequencing and/or genotyping and conduct the appropriate analysis.

More information about the funding opportunity can be found here.
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-DK-09-004.html

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