image: Genome sequencing equipment at the Johns Hopkins Center for Inherited Disease Research.
Credit: Tameka Shelford, Johns Hopkins Medicine
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
With renewed funding of up to $98.8 million for seven years, Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists will continue to be a worldwide resource for discovering the genes and their variations that contribute to human disease.
Leaders of the Johns Hopkins Center for Inherited Disease Research, established in 1996, received the fourth consecutive renewal for up to $98,880,900 in funds from a consortium of 10 institutes at the National Institutes of Health. The seven-year award is divided between over $20.2 million in base funding and up to an additional $78.6 million in project-specific funding.
“The Center has been vital to keeping Johns Hopkins at the forefront of human genetics research and advancing the efforts of genome-wide studies with technologies that scale to whole population levels,” says Kimberly Doheny, Ph.D., director of the Center for Inherited Disease Research and associate professor of genetic medicine and pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Since its inception, the Johns Hopkins center has completed more than 1,500 studies with more than 420 principal investigators worldwide. The center’s experts use the most advanced genomic technology to help scientists conduct and analyze genomic sequencing data from large populations to understand how variations in the genome accumulate and contribute to disease. Recent studies have explored cancer risk, eye disease, cleft lip and palate conditions, oral health, environmental influences on children’s health, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, structural brain disorders, obesity, alcohol use disorder and aging.
“The incredible resources provided by this award will continue to help us bring genetic medicine advances to all populations,” says Ambroise Wonkam, M.D., Ph.D., professor and director of the Department of Genetic Medicine and the McKusick-Nathans Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We are thrilled that the Center successfully competed for this renewal and are proud of the Center’s accomplishments through Dr. Doheny’s leadership.”
In addition to serving the global research community, technology and informatics experts at the Center for Inherited Disease Research support clinical genomics testing for patients at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and collaborate with Johns Hopkins scientists on genomic studies.
Experts working in the center include Hua Ling, Ph.D., Christopher Gocke, M.D., Michelle Mawhinney, M.S., Elvin Hsu, Sean Griffith, Beth Marosy, M.S., and Marcia Adams, M.S.