The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a plan to provide approximately $185 million over five years to a consortium researching genomic variation.
Initiated and funded by NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the Impact of Genomic Variation on Function (IGVF) consortium will receive the $185 million over five years in the form of 25 awards across 30 U.S. research sites to continue working to understand how genomic variation alters human genome function and influences human health and disease, according to a news release.
NIH said that, by integrating experimental methods with advanced computer models, the IGVF consortium will identify which variants in the genome are relevant for health and disease, producing information that will be of critical importance to clinicians.
All information generated by the consortium will be made freely available to the research community through a web portal to assist with future research projects, according to NIH, with the consortium set to develop a catalog of results and approaches used in their studies. Additionally, as thousands of genomic variants are associated with disease and it is not possible to manipulate each variant individually and in a biological setting, consortium researchers will develop computational modeling approaches to predict the impact of variants on genome function.
“Biomedical researchers have recently made remarkable advances in the experimental and computational methods available for elucidating genome function,” NHGRI Division of Genome Sciences director Carolyn Hutter said in the release. “The IGVF consortium will include world leaders in these areas, and together they will leverage these advances to tackle an incredibly challenging and important series of questions related to how genomic variation influences biological function.”