Michael J Fox Foundation offers their Parkinson’s data to world

(Image courtesy of CIMA http://www.cima.es/areas1_neuro/areas1_neuro_english.html) 

Data from one of the first genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which focused on Parkinson’s diseases and was funded in part by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF), is now being made available to researchers through the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), both of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NHGRI hopes to speed up research by making previously unavailable GWAS data sets publicly available to the research community.

The study, conducted by researchers at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., in collaboration with scientists at Perlegen Sciences, Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., was the first genome-wide association study applied to Parkinson’s disease. It was funded under MJFF’s Linked Efforts to Accelerate Parkinson’s Solutions (LEAPS) initiative.

“The Michael J. Fox Foundation is committed to spurring innovation by creating every possible opportunity for researchers to collaborate and share their knowledge,” said Katie Hood, chief executive officer of The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

Researchers interested in accessing the Mayo-Perlegen LEAPS Collaboration study dataset should go to dbGaP’s Web site and complete a request for access to the individual-level data at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/study.cgi?id=phs000048. Information on data access request procedures is available through the dbGaP “controlled access” Web page, at http://dbgap.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/aa/wga.cgi?login=&page=login.

Elaine Warburton  www.geneticsandhealth.com