Feng Chen
, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology and Cell Biology and Physiology, along with his collaborator Li Ding, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine (Oncology Division), have been awarded a four-year, $2.2 million R01 grant from the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) to fund a research project titled Pathogenic Variant Discovery Across a Broad Spectrum of Human Diseases.
“Rapidly accumulating genomic data and the fast expanding clinical sequencing have brought personalized medicine closer to reality,” says Dr. Chen. “However, the crucial step of systematically and accurately interpreting functional and clinical implications of sequence variants remains an unsolved problem.”
By combining pioneering computational tools and experimental approaches, Drs. Chen and Ding will help researchers and clinicians to better understand and utilize the sequencing data in a variety of settings. Although their studies will impact a wide spectrum of diseases, kidney disease and cancer will be their primary targets.