Events

Dr. Colin McKerlie, Senior Associate Scientist at SickKids and Director of Research Partnerships at the Toronto Centre for Phenogenomics, co-chaired a strategy workshop on mouse phenotyping that was held 07-09 April 2010 at the University of Toronto. The meeting was supported through OGI’s Genomics Capacity Building (GCB) Workshops Program.

With the completion of the human and mouse genomes in 2002, a key challenge for biomedical research and drug discovery over the next decade is to understand the function of every gene in the context of the whole organism. Building on the current International Knockout Mouse Consortium’s generation of a publically available resource of single gene mutations in every protein-coding gene of the genome by 2011, the Workshop’s strategy sessions brought together an international community of large-scale functional genomics programs and funders to plan the next step envisioned to be a systematic international effort to functionally annotate every gene. The International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC) has recently been established to coordinate this global effort.

The IMPC Steering Committee composed of large-scale mouse research and production centres (MRC Harwell, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Toronto’s Centre for Modeling Human Disease, Helmholtz Munich, Australian Phenomics Network, the ICS Strasbourg) and science funders (Wellcome Trust, UK Medical Research Council, NIH Human Genome Research Institute, European Commission) met on several occasions during the workshop to discuss funding, data sharing, organizational issues, and next steps during the current Planning Phase.

Key initial outcomes of the workshop

• Formal voting membership and organization of the Steering Committee was established, including appointment of a Chair, initiation of a Secretariat, and activities planning towards official launch of the IMPC in Q3 2011.
• A business plan for the IMPC was generated and published online in November 2010
• International partnerships initiated or further enabled by the workshop have resulted in over $114 million in new funding to date, including over $16 million in new research investment coming into Ontario.

Two days of scientific sessions were open to the public. For more information, please see the meeting agenda and list of participants. For PDF presentations from the 8-9 April 2010 IMPC Toronto Workshop, please open the workshop program link: http://www.phenogenomics.ca/news/seminars.html.