Liverpool Uni gets £2.2m for genomics hub

THE University of Liverpool has been awarded £2.2m to set up a genomic analysis hub for the north of England.

The hub is one of just three in the UK, which are being funded by the Medical Research Council in a £7m programme to boost the research community’s access to cutting-edge equipment for DNA sequencing.

The Medical Research Council gave £2m for the northern hub, with the remaining £200,000 coming from the Northwest Regional Development Agency.

Led by the University of Liverpool, the hub will also be used by three other partner universities – Manchester, Sheffield and  Lancaster – to accelerate the study of genetics and research into tumour sequencing, genetic susceptibility and personalised medicine.

The hub will expand the capacity of the university’s existing  Advanced Genomics Facility, which is a leading facility for pathogen sequencing.

Professor Neil Hall, from the School of Biological Sciences and Principal Investigator of the north of England Hub, said: “There is a pressing need to understand the basis of genetic variation and to use it to define the most appropriate treatment for each patient with a particular condition. This ‘personalised medicine’ will require establishing the DNA sequence of particular genes in those patients.

“Such research will benefit greatly from the new hub in the north of England by allowing much more productive sequencing technologies to be made available across the research community.”