Building on a successful pilot project, the National Institutes of Health has awarded grants to six research institutions to establish centers, collectively called the Data and Signature Generation Centers. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), both part of NIH, administer the program on behalf of the NIH Common Fund.
Drug Toxicity Signature Generation Center
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Visit Center websiteThe Drug Toxicity Signature Generation Center aims to develop cell signatures that will predict adverse events that might be caused by drugs and will identify other drugs that might lessen these side effects. The center will leverage the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System database to identify drugs that produce adverse events in heart, liver and neuronal function, and to search for drugs that may mitigate these events. Learn More
The HMS LINCS Center studies how normal and diseased human cells respond at the molecular level to perturbation by drugs, mutations, and the local environment as a means to develop improved predictive models of drug toxicity and response. Learn More
The LINCS Center for Transcriptomics is studying up to 50 cell types perturbed by a large number of chemical compounds and genetic reagents that activate or deactivate genes. Each perturbation will produce about 1,000 gene-expression readouts. By the project’s end, the center expects to have generated more than 1 million profiles of how genes are expressed in different cells. Learn More
The LINCS Proteomic Characterization Center for Signaling and Epigenetics studies cell disruption at the most basic levels: phosphorylation-mediated signaling — that is, how cells communicate internally; and epigenetics, or how cells perpetuate non-genetic information as they grow. Learn More
The MEP LINCS Center studies how both malignant and non-malignant cells are controlled by the microenvironments in which they live. The researchers will provide measurements of the impacts of thousands of different microenvironments on cellular phenotypes, protein make-up and gene expression readouts in cell lines. Learn More
The NeuroLINCS Center concentrates on human brain cells, which are far less understood than other cells in the body. The researchers believe it will be necessary to study these cell types directly to understand the causes of neurological disease and to develop new therapies. By applying LINCS-type perturbations to studying an array of human brain cells, the researchers hope to identify targets for developing drugs against neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), spinal muscular atrophy and Huntington’s disease. Learn More
Press Release: NIH awards aim to improve understanding of cell pathways, development of new therapies