WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said Tuesday it will launch an effort aimed at developing tools for safe and effective genome editing in humans.
The program, known as Somatic Cell Genome Editing, plans to award researchers about 190 million U.S. dollars over six years beginning this year, pending availability of funds, the NIH said.
These researchers will collaborate to improve treatment delivery mechanisms in patients, develop new and improved genome editors, develop safety and efficacy test assays, and assemble a genome editing toolkit to be shared with the scientific community, it said.
Funding opportunity announcements for this program are expected to be issued within a month.
"Genome editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 are revolutionizing biomedical research," NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement.
"The focus of the Somatic Cell Genome Editing program is to dramatically accelerate the translation of these technologies to the clinic for treatment of as many genetic diseases as possible."
Somatic cells are any of the non-reproductive cells of the body, which do not pass DNA down to the next generation.
By focusing on somatic cells, any changes to the DNA introduced by the genome editing therapeutics will not be inherited.
Many rare diseases, as well as some common disorders, are caused by changes in a person's DNA, either through changes inherited from parents or those that occur during a person's lifetime.
While advances in genome editing made over the past decade make it possible to precisely change the DNA code inside living cells, the NIH said many challenges remain preventing broad adoption of this technology in the clinic.
