US invests $185M in human genome research

The US-based National Institutes of Health is providing approximately $185 million over five years to the Impact of Genomic Variation on Function (IGVF) consortium, initiated and funded by NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). NHGRI will fund 25 awards across 30 US research sites. IGVF consortium investigators will work to understand how genomic variation alters human genome function, and how such variation influences human health and disease. The IGVF consortium will develop a catalogue of the results and approaches used in their studies. All information generated by the consortium will be made freely available to the research community via a web portal to assist with future research projects. Because there are thousands of genomic variants associated with disease, and it is not possible to manipulate each variant individually and in each biological setting, consortium researchers will also develop computational modelling approaches to predict the impact of variants on genome function.