$1,560,000 grant support for NYU

Two NYU Langone Medical Center researchers have received $1,560,000 in grant support for their first year of studies focused on microbiome and psoriasis and on microbiome and esophageal cancer from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The studies being conducted at NYU Langone Medical Center are two of several projects being conducted through the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research as part of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) taking place at institutions across the country.

Since 2007, the HMP has awarded more than $70 million to expand its exploration of how the trillions of microscopic organisms that live in and on our bodies affect our health. The human microbiome is all the microorganisms that reside in or on the human body, as well as all their DNA, or genomes.

In the new round of funding, the HPM will support pilot demonstration projects by researchers that will sample the microbiomes of healthy volunteers and volunteers with specific diseases over the next year.

In the first phases of the HMP, jumpstart funding was awarded to create a framework and data resources. Funding has also previously been awarded for the development of innovative technologies and computational tools, coordination of data analysis, and an examination of some of the ethical, legal and social implications of human microbiome research. The HMP plans to award more than $115 million in research grants during the project to sequence up to 600 microbial genomes and for selected demonstration projects that will examine the relationship between the microbiome in a specific niche of the body with a particular disease. The goal is to determine whether individuals share a core microbiome, and to examine how changes in microbial populations correlate with changes in human health.