Pilot Centers for Precision Disease Modeling (U54)

archived

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) invites U54 cooperative agreement applications for Pilot Centers for Precision Disease Modeling. The goal of the Centers is to support collaborative research projects that link current personalized medicine efforts in human subjects with advances in animal genomics and technologies for genetic manipulation and creation of interspecies somatic hybrids. Functionally linking these areas of research will produce programs to enhance the predictive value of pre-clinical studies based on the use of precision animal models. Centers will establish demonstration pipelines for pre-clinical scientific discovery, disease modeling, and development of interventions based on innovative animal models. These preclinical pipelines eventually will be an integral part of diagnostics, care and therapeutic treatment of patients. Each Center should have a set of required components: a Coordination Section to assure effective multidisciplinary leadership; a Pre-clinical/Co-clinical Section to collect and distribute patient information; a Bioinformatics Section to provide diverse computational abilities; and, as a major emphasis, a Disease Modeling Unit for the creation and testing of at least three precision animal projects. Even though the centers will work on a limited number of focused projects, it is expected that the program will maintain multifaceted research activities to build core model systems that can be adjusted as required to accommodate a broad spectrum of diseases.

High