Ingenuity Systems Announces Awardees of Grant Program at AACR

Ingenuity® Systems, a leading provider of biomedical information and analysis solutions, today announced six winners of its inaugural company-sponsored grant program. Winning applicants will gain access to either IPA®, an all-in-one web-based application to upload, find, compare and understand causal connections between diseases, genes and networks of upstream regulators, or Ingenuity® Variant Analysis™, a web-based analysis application that enables rapid identification of causal variants for human diseases from sequencing data.

“The six winning projects span a diverse range of questions we can now ask with genome and transcriptome data,” noted Dr. Daniel MacArthur, Assistant Professor in the Analytic and Translational Genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital, and one of the grant program judges. “Some use deep sequencing to explore how DNA can vary from cell to cell, not just in cancers but perhaps in brain diseases too. Some use new data to investigate diseases, like depression and PTSD, that have long been hard to study. And others apply new methods to learn why people do or do not respond to certain drugs for cancer, cholesterol, and even the first ever genetically traced disease, sickle cell anemia.”

Awardees represent worldwide institutions and include:
o Dr. William B. Dobyns, Seattle Children’s Research Institute - Exploring germline and post zygotic mutations in human developmental brain disorders
o Dr. Hans Knoblauch, Charité University Medical Center Berlin - Investigation of the human skeletal muscle transcriptome in statin-induced myopathy
o Dr. Richard W. McCombie, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory - Discovery of genetic variation underlying major depressive disorder and co-morbid edema
o Dr. Helen Rizos, University of Sydney - Manipulating the B-RAF/MEK pathway in the genesis and treatment of melanoma
o Dr. Vivien Sheehan, Baylor College of Medicine - Genetic determinants of fetal hemoglobin response to hydroxyurea in children with sickle cell anemia
o Dr. Levent Sipahi, Wayne State University School of Medicine - Elucidating molecular determinants in PTSD risk and resilience

“Ingenuity products are built to spark robust biological discoveries. By awarding them to these scientists, we’re proud to support thoughtful and ambitious science that will deepen our societal understanding of health,” said Dr. Doug Bassett, Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Ingenuity Systems.