To tackle the human health challenges that face the world today, the FNIH develops collaborations with top experts from government, industry, academia and the not-for-profit sector and provides a neutral environment where we can work productively toward a common goal.
The Bespoke Gene Therapy Consortium (BGTC) is a developing public-private partnership dedicated to making gene therapy a reality for people with rare genetic diseases affecting populations too small to be viable from the current commercial perspective. Building on the successful Accelerating Medicines Partnership model, this program will focus on developing an operational playbook that invokes the use of streamlined templates, master regulatory files, and uniform production processes. It is anticipated that following a pilot phase of 4-6 test cases, a pathway toward the commercial viability of these therapies will be found. This may ultimately have a tremendously positive impact on the larger field of gene therapy if it moves more broadly into the era of genome editing.
The National Institute of Nursing Research hosted a two-day Summit to gather a variety of stakeholder perspectives on the spectrum of caregiving issues and research for conditions and illnesses that may occur across the lifespan.
Plasticity and Mechanisms of Cognitive Remediation in Older Adults supports a grant for a multicenter clinical research trial on remediating age-related cognitive decline through mindfulness-based stress reduction and exercise.
Sarcopenia 2 seeks to establish evidence-based cut-points for muscle mass and strength and determine their predictive validity for clinically meaningful outcomes (such as mobility, fractures, hospitalization and death); evaluate relative strength as a discriminator for mobility limitation and incident disability; and explore the potential usefulness of sarcopenia as a clinical endpoint in randomized clinical trials.
The Sarcopenia 1 project launched in 2010 and aimed to establish the first evidence-based definition of sarcopenia (muscle weakness), which is still not recognized as a medical condition.
This is the first project in a two-stage strategy that seeks to characterize beta cell function for predicting long-term beta cell response to an intervention based on short-term measures. The first stage’s goal is to characterize key methodological issues in the assessment of beta cell function by evaluating Mixed Meal Tolerance (MTT) and Arginine Stimulation Tests against the standard Frequently Sampled Intravenous Glucose Tolerance (FSIGT) Test in a series of clinical studies.
The primary objective of this project was to determine whether a 30kDa adipocyte-secreted protein, adiponectin, has utility as predictive serum biomarker of glycemic control in normal non-diabetic subjects and patients with type 2 diabetes, following treatment with a novel and promising new class of compounds, PPARγ agonists. Results confirmed previous relationships between adiponectin levels and metabolic parameters, and support the robust and predictive utility of adiponectin across the spectrum of glucose tolerance.