NIEHS Funds Six-Member Toxicogenomics Consortium

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, North Carolina—Five academic research centers will join the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to form a consortium to study how genes interact with the environment to cause cancer and other diseases, an emerging field known as toxicogenomics. Each of the groups in the 5-year, $37 million program funded by the NIEHS will receive grants totaling more than $7 million.

The consortium will work with NIEHS scientists and use genomics to determine how disease occurs, identify potential environmental hazards, predict potential disease, identify exposed individuals, and prevent disease. The consortium members and their projects are as follows:

NIEHS: gene expression profiling to explore environmental stresses on human health. This research group will make use of gene expression microarray technology validation studies.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: the study of susceptibility factors in the genomic response to toxicants.

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center: gene expression profiling in transgenic mice and rats, and in human cell lines exposed to environmentally relevant agents.

Oregon Health and Science University: cell-specific injury in the central nervous system and gene profiling of induction mechanisms associated with neurotoxicant exposures.

Duke University: gene expression profiling to explore environmental stresses on human health.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: gene expression profiling to explore environmental alkylating agents stresses on human health.