USA -The National Institutes of Health has launched a program to understand every human gene’s function better and generate a catalog of the molecular and cellular consequences of inactivating each gene.

The Molecular Phenotypes of Null Alleles in Cells (MorPhiC) program, managed by the National Human Genome Research Institute, will be funded initially for five years for a total of US$42.5 million, pending the availability of funds.

Scientists will initially study the function of 1000 genes by disabling them in various cell models across developmental stages.

Currently, just over 6,000 of the estimated 19,000 protein-coding genes have been well studied, and among those, only a subset of their functions is well characterized.

“The function of thousands of genes is still a mystery, and they likely serve vital biological roles,” Colin Fletcher, NHGRI program director in the Division of Genome Sciences, said in a statement.

“Understanding fundamental biology can help us figure out why certain diseases occur and how can we develop drugs to target and treat those diseases.”

Projects funded by MorPhiC will explore protein function by generating null alleles, or versions of genes that do not make functional proteins.

This effort is complicated by the multifunctional nature of many genes, whose behavior may change depending on the cell type in which they are expressed, and which may or may not be active in a given tissue, depending on factors such as cell signaling, environment, and age.

Research within the program will take place in various cell culture models, including organoids — 3D “mini-organs” composed of multiple cell types and mimic the functions of the tissues and organs found in the human body.

Pending the success of Phase 1, the NIH plans to initiate a second phase in a larger set of human genes.

Five researchers have won Phase 1 funding for the MorPhiC program. They are Mazhar Adli of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Luke Gilbert of the University of California, San Francisco.

Other awardees include Danwei Huangfu of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, Paul Robson of Jackson Laboratory, and Stephan Schürer of the University of Miami.

Also, over the next four years, the National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program will award US$130 million to researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine to accelerate the widespread use of AI in biomedical research and health care.

Bridge2AI will fund four data generation projects to create comprehensive AI-ready datasets that will lay the groundwork for new, interpretable, and trustworthy AI technologies.

The four multi-site projects will be unified by the Bridge Center, an executive hub that oversees the integration, dissemination, and evaluation of all Bridge2AI activities.

Grant for diversity in genomic research

In another related news, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Accelerate Precision Health program will award US$46 million total in funding to the nation’s four historically black medical colleges—Charles Drew University College of Medicine, Howard University College of Medicine, Meharry Medical College, and Morehouse School of Medicine.

The funding is meant to address significant gaps in genomics research, create new tools and methods to prevent and treat disease, and accelerate precision health for everyone.

In addition, the program will expand research opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students, support the creation of a new Master of Science program in Genetic Counseling, support the recruitment of anchor faculty in genomics, and fund state-of-the-art tools for data handling, storage, and analysis, among other elements.

Further to that, Scribe Therapeutics announced a strategic collaboration with Sanofi to use Scribe’s CRISPR genome editing technologies to enable genetic modification of novel natural killer (NK) cell therapies for cancer.

The agreement grants Sanofi non-exclusive rights to Scribe’s proprietary CRISPR platform of wholly owned enzymes to create ex vivo NK cell therapies.

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