Wellcome’s Sanger Institute to focus research on genetics
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute said that it told staff last month that it plans to focus its scientific efforts, identifying genetics as the area in which it can make the greatest - and a unique - contribution.
“This experimental focus will be concentrated on global studies of natural genetic variation in humans and pathogens, and experimental variation of genome sequence in the model organisms, mouse and zebrafish, as well as pathogens”, it said in a press release this week.
In its 13-year history, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has been a leader in some of the world's most important biomedical research projects. It said its managers are determined the new focus will strengthen its ability to make lasting contributions to transforming genomic research into biomedical understanding.
Director Allan Bradley (pictured) said: “Our key strength in high-throughput research allied to our focus on genetics will yield data and resources of comparable lasting value over the next five years”.
Genetic analysis will cover humans, mouse, zebrafish and pathogens - a breadth of analysis which is one of its strengths. In addition, the Institute said the programmes would develop “synergistic and coherent themes”: for example, pathogens can be used to probe mammalian gene function, and thus research in pathogen-human interactions will help to prioritise genes to be studied experimentally.
Vision
“The vision and scale of our model organism programmes has been recognized by international funding agencies and the Institute has put in place clone resources and other technologies to generate mutants by gene targeting at a very high rate,” Professor Bradley said.
In human genetics, the Institute is already targeting medically relevant genes in conditions such as cancer and metabolic disease. In these studies variation in patient samples is captured and analysis of the same genes in control populations is used to assess disease-associated variation. The Institute also made a major investment in its world-class genotyping capabilities.
The Institute has led the approach of placing data and resources into the public domain as the most efficient mechanism to speed biomedical research. This will continue: raw unprocessed data, assembled/curated data and biological resources will be made rapidly and freely available.
A full compendium of gene function that has been experimentally validated will provide a knowledge base that will identify many new therapeutic avenues for human genetic or infectious disease, Professor Bradley said.
The Institute, which receives the majority of its funding from the Wellcome Trust, was founded in 1992 as the focus for UK sequencing efforts. It is responsible for the completion of the sequence of approximately one-third of the human genome as well as genomes of model organisms such as mouse and zebrafish, and more than 90 pathogen genomes.
In October last year, Wellcome Trust awarded £334m in new funding to enable the Institute to build on its world-class scientific achievements and exploit the wealth of genome data now available to answer important questions about health and disease.
Programmes are built around a Faculty of more than 30 senior researchers, but there are reports that some staff face an uncertain future as the new focus unfolds.
11th October 2006
