Pat Sullivan Receives GAIN Award

October 10, 2006

The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health today announced the first round of genotyping award recipients under the Genetic Association Information Network (GAIN), a public-private partnership to support large-scale genomic studies. CCGS/Genetics professor Pat Sullivan received one of these awards to elucidate the genetic basis of major depression.

The GAIN project’s goal is to find the genetic causes of common diseases by conducting large-scale genomic studies and making the results of these studies publicly available. Private donors have contributed around $26 million to the project so far. FNIH added that it expects to seek additional funds to support further genotyping studies under GAIN.

The first six studies under the project, chosen out of nearly three dozen applicants, are:

“Collaborative Association Study of Psoriasis,” led by Goncalo Abecasis of the University of Michigan School of Public Health
“International Multi-Center ADHD Genetics Project,” led by Stephen Faraone of the Research Foundation of the State University of New York
“Genome-Wide Association Study of Schizophrenia,” led by Pablo Gejman of the Center for Psychiatric Genetics, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute, and Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Evanston
“Whole Genome Association Study of Bipolar Disorder,” led by John Rice Kelsoe of the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine
“Major Depression: Stage 1 Genome-wide Association in Population-Based Samples,” led by Patrick Francis Sullivan of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Search for Susceptibility Genes for Diabetic Nephropathy in Type 1 Diabetes,” led by James Heber Warram of the Joslin Diabetes Center.

GAIN will pay to genotype around 18,000 samples across the six diseases over the next four to eight months, using genotyping services provided by Perlegen Sciences (in partnership with Pfizer) and the Broad Institute (in partnership with Affymetrix).

A portion of the $5 million provided by Pfizer will support development of a database to house GAIN data at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

In addition to free genotyping, the six selected studies will receive additional grants from NIH to support analysis of the new genetic data.