Date: 2013-10-15
Type of information: Grant
Company: CV genes-at-target consortium - (Horizon Discovery - UK, Deutsches Herzzentrum München - Germany, University of Leicester - UK, Oxford University - UK, UMC Utrecht - The Netherlands, LMU Munich - Germany, University of Lübeck - Germany, Bioceros - The Netherlands, Clinical Gene Networks, European Screening Port, 4SC Discovery - Germany, Genedata.
Investors: European Commission’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7)
Amount: €5.75 million ($7.8 million)
Funding type: grant
Planned used:
Others: * On October 15, 2013, Horizon Discovery, a UK provider of research tools to support the development of personalized medicines, has announced it has received a share of an EU FP7 Grant totaling €5.75 million ($7.8 million), awarded to a consortium of research institutions and companies for the ‘CV genes-at-target’ project. The project aims to investigate genomic risk loci for coronary artery disease (CAD) and stroke in both in vitro and in vivo settings, and to determine whether any are suitable targets for therapeutics.
Horizon will work with Leicester University to engineer the candidate genomic risk loci into normal human cell lines (induced pluripotent cells and differentiated endothelial and vascular smooth muscle cell types) in order to study which SNP-variations have a predisposing impact towards cardiovascular disease. Horizon will use its GENESIS™ genome editing platform to engineer the cell lines, which now includes an expanding array of guided-nuclease techniques (ZFNs and CRISPR) alongside its proprietary precision rAAV-mediated homologous recombination technology. This project will expand Horizon’s panel of isogenic X-MAN™ human disease model cell lines into a new therapeutic area, in which genetics are thought to play a significant role alongside other environmental factors such as diet and exercise.
The consortium will then carry out molecular profiling of the genome-edited cell lines. This will include analysis of locus-specific and global gene expression (using microarrays) to define biological pathways impacted by each risk variant, complemented by analysis of relevant proteins. These data will be integrated with those from other investigators involved in the project, examining pathways in relation to genotype at a tissue level.
Other groups involved in the project and each receiving a share of the grant include: Deutsches Herzzentrum München, University of Leicester, Oxford University, UMC Utrecht, LMU Munich, University of Lübeck, Bioceros, Clinical Gene Networks, European Screening Port, 4SC Discovery, and Genedata.
Therapeutic area: Cardiovascular diseases
