South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute Awarded First NIH Grant
The South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute (STDOI) at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has received its first major grant award from the National Institutes of Health. The South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute was established as a major research center to advance research of diabetes and obesity, develop better treatments and ultimately improve the health of residents in South Texas and beyond. "This exciting and generous grant award from the National Institutes of Health exemplifies the significant funding that UTRGV's cutting-edge research programs will generate as the university strives for Tier 1 status," said Dr. Francisco Fernandez, inaugural dean of the UTRGV School of Medicine. "Support of this caliber also catalyzes our mission at the School of Medicine, allowing us to focus our research on addressing the critical health care needs of the Rio Grande Valley." Dr. John Blangero, director of the Genomics Computing Center at the STDOI and interim director of neurosciences at the UTRGV School of Medicine, has received an award of $4 million from the National Institute of Mental Health for a four-year project to search for genes influencing psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression. The project involves sequencing the entire genomes of more than 2,000 individuals in families in which these disorders are present. The families were sampled from around the world and include participants from South Texas, Pennsylvania, Australia, Costa Rica and Scotland. After obtaining the vast sequence data containing information on the more than 3 billion DNA base pairs for each individual, Blangero and colleagues at the STDOI will employ advanced statistical methods that they have developed to exhaustively search the genomes for genes that can explain the variation in disease risk within and between families. These intensive analyses will be performed on the new 10,000-processor, high-performance computer cluster named Medusa. Other STDOI scientists working on the project include molecular geneticist Dr. Joanne Curran, statistical geneticist Dr. Laura Almasy, and Dr. Marcio Almeida, a bioinformatician.