Innate Immunity in Heart, Lung and Blood Disease

The Innate Immunity PGA (IIPGA) is a collaboration between the Respiratory Sciences Center at the University of Arizona, The Respiratory and Genetics Research Group at the Channing Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and The Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP). The IIPGA is funded as part of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institutes (NHLBI) Programs for Genomic Applications (PGA).

The goal of the IIPGA is to discover and model the associations between nucleotide sequence variations, primarily Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) and Insertion/Deletion polymorphisms (Indels), in the genes of the innate immunity pathway in humans. The Program is two-fold: Part 1 identifies the common variable sites through sequencing and establishes their relative allele frequencies and haplotypes in four human populations having different evolutionary histories. Part two utilizes this data in case-control association studies of airways disease (i.e., asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). We have available to us a full array of bioinformatics tools for performing association analysis in human genetics. These tools and resources are important for any association study relating innate immune responses to disease in a whole host of complex common human disorders such as: airways disease, myocardial infarction, hypertension, stroke, Crohn's Disease, allergy, and diabetes to name a few.

Two of the major goals of the IIPGA are to establish a website to disseminate data to the public and develop an educational training program that will allow individuals with varying levels of knowledge and experience to become acquainted with modern genetic techniques.