Grant: Emerging Team Grant: From Genes to Proteins, Cells, Tissues and Patients - LOI

Given the recent successes in identifying genetic risk factors for common diseases, there now is a major scientific challenge to translating these findings into better clinical practice. It is therefore imperative to develop strategies and scientific platforms to address this challenge. Our Emerging Team will endeavor to meet this challenge with its initial focus on a biological pathway that has been implicated in multiple immune mediated diseases. Specifically, we and others have shown that genetic variation in four genes of the IL23R pathway (including the R381Q variant in IL23R) is associated with Crohn¿s disease, ulcerative colitis and psoriasis. Our Team, which includes basic and clinical researchers, has the diverse set of expertise necessary to understand the mechanisms by which the associated genetic variants influence disease susceptibility as well as to design and test potential therapies. Our Team also has the structures and partners in place for the scientific planning, teaching, dissemination of information, and commercialization of findings. We feel that our proposal is of great clinical relevance as (1) this pathway is a current target in clinical trials; (2) we have developed IL23R specific bioactive peptide antagonists and (3) we are creating novel models for pre-clinical testing.