Leishmaniasis, African sleeping sickness and Chagas’ disease might sound foreign to most, but they’re going to get plenty of attention at the University of Pennsylvania thanks to a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The two-year, $1.7 million grant, announced in late March, will help researches share data and develop tools to fight globally neglected diseases. In particular, it will support the implementation of a genome database resources devoted to kinetoplastid parasites, the organisms responsible for the aforementioned ailments.
“Improving our understanding of any organism–including kinetoplastid parasites–depends on our ability to sort through mountains of data,” says David S. Roos, a biology professor at Penn who will coordinate the project along with Christian Stoeckert of Penn’s Department of Genetics and colleagues from the University of Georgia and Seattle Biomedical Research Institute.
Those partners are part of TriTrypDB.org, which leverages existing infrastructure to rapidly and economically provide researches around the world with improved access to genomic-scale datasets, like complete genome sequences and catalogs of protein molecules. The goal is to use the datasets to expedite the development of new treatments and diagnoses for use in the laboratory, clinic and field.
“Providing such information to investigators worldwide has been cited as the single highest priority by the community of scientists working to develop new drugs targeting these parasites,” says Roos.
Source: David S. Roos, University of Pennsylvania
Writer: Joe Petrucci
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