The Foundation for NIH (FNIH) http://fnih.org awarded a four year grant for $4 million to support the buildout of a European arm of the Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) Knowledge Portal which is part of the NIH “Accelerating Medicines Partnership Type 2 Diabetes” (AMP T2D) initiative www.nih.gov/research-training/accelerating-medicines-partnership-amp/type-2-diabetes.
The AMP T2D Knowledge Portal a public-private partnership that brings together NIH, biopharmaceutical companies, and not-for-profit organizations to search and analyze genetic and clinical information on individuals with type 2 diabetes with serious complications.
The Portal is able to generate new understanding of the disease by revealing relationships between human genome-wide sequence variations in potential targets. Plans are for the portal to contain data integrated from existing genetic studies from close to 100,000 individuals by early 2016.
The grant was awarded to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) www.embl.de/research/interdisciplinary_research/bioinformatics, the University of Oxford www.ox.ac.uk, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University www.broadinstitute.org.
The funding will be used establish one or more new hubs outside of the U.S such as the buildout of a European hub based in the United Kingdom. AMD T2D hopes to expand this pilot hub to various other international sites that could allow groups to participate on any continent. The portal’s U.S hub is located at the Broad Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts and funded by grants from the National Institute on Digestive and Kidney Disease and Institute.