With NIH grant, Cedars-Sinai helps bring big data to neuro disease research

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

25-Sep-2014

Contact: Sandy Van sandy@prpacific.com 808-526-1708 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center @cedarssinai

LOS ANGELES (Sept. 25, 2014) Investigators at the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute have received a grant from the National Institutes of Health to participate in a consortium taking the study of motor neuron disorders such as Lou Gehrig's disease and spinal muscular atrophy to a new, comprehensive perspective.

"We will be working as part of an NIH initiative to create databases of disease 'signatures' by generating and analyzing thousands of data points. Scientists often focus on very small things, such as a single signaling pathway in cells or a single gene or protein that is involved in some way with disease development, but identifying and correcting one component rarely leads to a cure. This is especially true in the brain because its networks are very complex," said Clive Svendsen, PhD, professor and director of the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute, principal investigator of Cedars-Sinai's part of the study.

Svendsen, the Kerry and Simone Vickar Family Foundation Distinguished Chair in Regenerative Medicine, compares this shift in perspective to the way meteorologists began predicting weather years ago viewing global trends and collecting vast amounts of data to create a forecast for a specific place and time.

The grant is part of an NIH initiative called the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures, or LINCS, program, which aims to develop a "library" of molecular signatures that describes how different cells respond to proteins, genes, chemicals essentially anything that may come in contact with or change the cell or its activity.

Cedars-Sinai is a member of a group, NeuroLINCS, studying motor neuron disorders, which include Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and spinal muscular atrophy. The NeuroLINCS study will be coordinated by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, with additional collaborators at the Gladstone Institutes at the University of California, San Francisco, Johns Hopkins University and the Broad Institute.

NeuroLINCS is one of six consortiums recently funded through NIH's LINCS program to study diabetes, cancers and other diseases using cell lines and specialized stem cells called induced pluripotent stem cells. Derived from a patient's own skin samples and "sent back in time" through genetic manipulation to an embryonic state, these cells can be made into any cell of the human body.

The Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute, which has developed a national reputation for the quality of its induced pluripotent stem cells, was asked to provide the stem cells for all of the consortiums. The cells are produced in the Regenerative Medicine Institute's Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Core Facility, directed by Dhruv Sareen, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical sciences and faculty research scientist with the Department of Biomedical Sciences.

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With NIH grant, Cedars-Sinai helps bring big data to neuro disease research