Hall Grant Funds Genomic Professorship

After years of collaboration, planning and research, the School of Pharmacy at the University of Kansas and the Higuchi Bioscience Center has funding in place for a new professorship in genomics. Funding became available when the Hall Foundation of Kansas City expressed interest in funding the Imaging Center at the KU Medical Center. Because the School of Pharmacy and the KU Medical Center had already discussed collaborating in the areas of gene therapy, gene identification and imaging, funding of the professorship in genomics dovetailed nicely with funding for the Imaging Center. The state of Kansas will match the Hall gift, increasing available funds for the professorship to $1 million.

Specifically, the professorship will fund research in the relatively new field of pharmacogenomics. Pharm-acogenomics involves the massive screening of genes to identify those that are expressed in people with certain genetic conditions or diseases so that drugs that target those genes can be developed. The rise in pharma-cogenomic research activity is due only in part to the completion of the human genome project. Although researchers now know much about the genetic structure in humans thanks to the project, they still have a world of information yet to discover about the function of many of these genes. "Since the completion of the human genome project, the number of research questions related to gene function has increased exponentially," said HBC Director Eli Michaelis, one of the driving forces behind the effort to fund a genomics professorship.

"Now that we have the money for a professorship, we're working hard to attract top-notch researchers," Michaelis said. "Most of these researchers are already working in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, but we can now use this professorship as a bait." Michealis said that he and other HBC directors have agreed that to attract the highest quality person for the job, they would have to provide a state-of-the-art facility as well. "We didn't want them to walk into an empty lab, so we've designated about $200,000 to purchase equipment and to establish a genomics research facility." The facility will have genomic array and scanning instrumentation, equipment for handling the purification of many DNA samples, and computers and software to analyze the complex information generated from genomic analyses.

Though this equipment is what Michaelis calls straightforward and fundamental, it is nonetheless amazing. For example the genomic array and scanning equipment will have the capacity to scan slides containing DNA microarrays with anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 individual genes, to locate a specific gene a researcher wants to examine. Ultimately, the equipment can assist a geneticist in determining whether a particular gene is expressed more frequently in diseased or healthy cells. Computer programs in the lab will be used to search data banks that will help researchers single out those genes expressed during a diseased state. Geneticists are trained to search such data banks for information about a particular gene's function in the cell as well. "For example, they may discover that five of the genes expressed in a particular tissue sample have to do with how cells signal back and forth. Or maybe several will have to do with how a cell contracts or how it metabolizes nutrients," said Michaelis. "Unfortunately, many of these computer searches single out genes whose functions we know nothing about." That's where the challenge begins for people working in the field of pharmacogenomics - determining if a particular gene is a target for drug development based on its function in the cell. With all that's left to uncover about the function of the myriad of human genes, whoever accepts the professorship at the University of Kansas will have the exciting opportunity to make unprecedented and collaborative discoveries that may ultimately lead to the treatment or cure of human disease.