NIH awards $2.9M grant to study genetic cause of IBD in Hispanic patients
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Researchers at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine were awarded a $2.9 million grant by the NIH to study the genetic data of more than 3,000 Hispanic individuals to better understand inflammatory bowel disease in that population.
According to a university press release, the grant was awarded to Maria Abreu, MD, director of the Miller School’s Crohn’s and Colitis Center, and Jacob McCauley, PhD, director of the Center for Genome Technology and Biorepository Facility, who have already collected DNA from nearly 2,000 Hispanic patients in South Florida. With this grant, researchers will spend the next 5 years collecting and assessing genetic data from an additional 3,000 patients.
“There’s more statistical power in the numbers,” McCauley said in the release. “We’ve got to change the recruitment and the enrollment process and let these patient populations that haven’t really been approached in the past know about these studies, and try to enroll them to help us with these discoveries.”
Abreu and McCauley will work with six other universities chosen to participate in the NIH grant as genetics research centers in the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Genetics Consortium. Recruitment of Hispanic patients with and without IBD will begin in early 2023, and volunteers will donate blood and saliva samples for genetic sequencing.
“The NIH now recognizes that Hispanic and Black people, who are a very important percentage of our country, are underrepresented in all of these studies,” Abreu said in the release. “A whole slew of genes have been described as increasing the risk of IBD, but they’ve all been described in Europeans. But what if across different ancestries those same genes are also found? Well, that means that those genes must be very important. We’d like to blow up how we’re studying these diseases.”
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts