Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins invest $10 million to combat major human diseasesBlacksburg 24 January 2002 Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech and the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Bloomberg School of Public Health have signed a $10 million bioinformatics research collaboration to target human infectious diseases. Each university will invest a minimum of $1 million per year for five years to better understand tuberculosis, AIDS, malaria, measles, and other deadly illnesses. Worldwide, more than 17 million people each year succumb to these and other infectious diseases.
This collaboration will provide much-needed information to discern how infectious pathogens spread, how pathogen genomes change over time because of various environmental factors, and how humans respond to pathogens on the molecular, cellular, and organismal level. Technologies for rapid detection, identification, and remediation will be developed as part of this research. VBI and JHU will also pursue significant additional extramural funding for this effort.
The bioinformatics capabilities at VBI will allow comparisons of multiple human responses to different pathogens as opposed to traditional models that looked at only a single response for one disease. Experiments that were traditionally conducted on a single pathogen in a petri dish will now be performed on supercomputers housed in VBI's core computing facility. The new technology will compliment the wealth of medical and molecular biology research being conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The project will begin in February 2002. During its first phase, researchers will study how disease parasites resuscitate from dormancy, model cellular responses to viruses, collect data from malaria outbreak sites in co-operation with local medical centres, and develop gene chips to assess virulence factors of pathogens. The second phase will involve computational analysis to understand mechanisms of disease resistance and the development of new tools for prevention, diagnosis, and cure.
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