$4.5 Million Comparative Toxicogenomics Database Grant Awarded to the MDI Biological Laboratory

September 18 , 2006

BAR HARBOR -- The Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) has received a 5 year grant totaling $4.5 million from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Library of Medicine, both components of the National Institutes of Health. The grant will support continued development of the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (TM), a publicly available database that promotes understanding about the effects of environmental chemicals on human health.

Over 80,000 new chemicals have been brought into commercial production and released into the environment in the last century, but their effects on human health are poorly understood. Scientists now agree that many diseases such as asthma, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, immune deficiency disorders, and Parkinson disease may be influenced or caused by exposure to environmental chemicals.  CTD will enable scientists, policy makers, and activists to better understand the complex relationship between environmental chemicals and human disease by presenting precise information about interactions between chemicals and critical genes and proteins.  CTD includes information about interactions that occur in thousands of different species to provide insights into the genetic basis of different susceptibilities to disease and to provide a broader perspective on how chemicals affect biological systems. 

Dr. James Boyer, Principal Investigator of the CTD grant and the NIEHS Center for Membrane Toxicity Studies at MDIBL, indicated, “There is a deep history of using cross-species comparative approaches to understand basic toxicological responses at MDIBL.  CTD stems from this history and will help to bridge the connection between the environment and human health.”   

Launched publicly by MDIBL in fall 2004 as a pilot project, CTD (ctd.mdibl.org) combines the emerging technologies of genomics -- the analysis of genetic material, and bioinformatics -- the science of managing and analyzing biological data using advanced computer techniques.  It integrates diverse data specific to comparative genomics and environmental health that was previously disconnected in the public domain.  It integrates chemical, gene and protein, molecular interaction, functional, human disease, reference, and sequence data using both automated methods and manual curation by scientific experts.  Although still early in its development, there is a robust set of data in CTD which includes information on approximately 60,000 chemicals, 6,000 human diseases,  21,000 manually curated chemical-gene and protein interactions, and genes in over 80,000 species. 

According to Dr. Carolyn Mattingly, Director of Bioinformatics at MDIBL, “Comparative genomics holds great promise for environmental health research.  Our goal is that CTD will be an important tool that will help scientists access, visualize and think about data differently in order to better understand how chemicals affect networks of genes and proteins and consequently, human health.”  This new grant will allow MDIBL to substantially expand the amount of curated data in CTD, enhance its capabilities for visualizing and interpreting data, and improve the database’s infrastructure and performance.

"Given that nearly every human disease can be caused, modified or altered by environmental agents, NIEHS is in a unique position to focus on the interplay between exposures and biological responses," said NIEHS Director David A. Schwartz, M.D.  "The availability of a tool such as the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database will strengthen the environmental health science communities' ability to translate the enormous volume of data resulting from genomic experiments, to identify and validate biomarkers of biological response to exposures, and ultimately to develop new diagnostic tools and therapeutic interventions."

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