NIH stimulus funds go to bioethics and genomics
April 14, 2009 by Grace Ibay
Filed under Health
Next-generation technologies are exploding so rapidly in genomics and personalized medicine that the NIH want to help jump-start experiments that will answer some of the bioethical concerns that rose along with the era.
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More than 200 grants could receive up to $1 million each from the stimulus funds that were earmarked for the National Institutes of Health’ Challenge Grants program.
Ten bioethics-focused programs address issues relating to the commerce of direct-to-consumer genetic tests; ethical issue posed by nanomedicine, tissue engineering and similar emerging technologies; and informed consent issues as medical records become electronic.
Genomics becomes an even hotter topic as the NIH requests for more advances and developments of new methods and technologies. The wants focus on sequencing regions involved in infectious and autoimmune diseases, like the MHC region and other highly-repetitive highly-variable regions. And as large-scale sequencing become too much for computer to handle, technologies that better manage data in several fields are research the NIH wants to look closely as well.
