$8 million grant to fund Rat Genome Database at MCW

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For Immediate Release:

February 19, 2015

$8 million grant to fund Rat Genome Database at MCW

The Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) has received a four-year, $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to fund the Rat Genome Database (RGD), a unique, globally-accessible collection of data from ongoing rat genetic and genomic research efforts.

Howard J. Jacob, Ph.D., the Warren P. Knowles Professor of Genetics and director of MCW’s Human and Molecular Genetics Center, is the primary investigator on the grant.

The RGD was established at MCW in 1999 by Dr. Jacob and Peter J. Tonellato, Ph.D., senior research scientist at Harvard Medical School, to collect, consolidate and integrate data from genetic and genomic research into rat models and make the data widely available to the scientific community. Additionally, the RGD holds complete files of rat, human and mouse genes, as well as files on specific animal strains.

RGD contains nearly 4.5 million functional data annotations for rat, human and mouse genes and information on 500,000 disease-specific annotations. In 2014, more than 180,000 users in 190 countries accessed RGD for scientific research data.

“The rat is a model organism for investigating the biology and pathophysiology of disease,” said Dr. Jacob. “Additionally, our bioinformaticians under Dr. Mary Shimoyama, assistant professor of surgery and bioinformatics, have created tools to allow users to seamlessly move from the rat genomic region to the corresponding human genomic region, and to create comprehensive summaries of information on all three species in a single report, both of which are valuable tools to genomics researchers.”

Including the new grant, funding for RGD has exceeded $35 million. The information curated within is free for users. Those users include research and academic institutions, medical schools and healthcare institutions, and pharmacy and biotechnology companies.

About the Medical College of Wisconsin

The Medical College of Wisconsin is the state’s only private medical school and health sciences graduate school. Founded in 1893, it is dedicated to leadership and excellence in education, patient care, research and community engagement. More than 1,200 students are enrolled in MCW’s medical school and graduate school programs in Milwaukee. New regional medical education campuses are scheduled to open in Green Bay in 2015, and in Central Wisconsin in 2016, with each recruiting initial classes of 20-25 students. A major national research center, MCW is the largest research institution in the Milwaukee metro area and second largest in Wisconsin. In FY 2013-14, faculty received approximately $154 million in external support for research, teaching, training and related purposes, of which approximately $138 million is for research. This total includes highly competitive research and training awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Annually, MCW faculty direct or collaborate on more than 2,000 research studies, including clinical trials. Additionally, more than 1,350 physicians provide care in virtually every specialty of medicine for more than 425,000 patients annually.

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