CAMDEN, N.J. – The National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), one of the 27 institutes and centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has selected the Coriell Institute for Medical Research to manage its biospecimen and data collection, the “NIMH Repository and Genomics Resource (NRGR),” the largest centralized national biorepository for psychiatric research.
The NIMH is the lead federal agency for research on mental disorders, with the mission “to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery, and cure.”
“This award exemplifies our global reputation for scientific excellence, operational integrity, and biobanking expertise,” said Nahid Turan, PhD., Coriell’s Chief Biobanking Officer and Principal Investigator for the NRGR. “As a pioneer in biobanking, Coriell has set the standard for best practices and been at the forefront in accelerating scientific research. Coriell has established and stewarded key biobanks that contain some of the world’s most extensive collections of well characterized, high quality cell lines, DNA, and other biomaterials that have been used to advance biomedical research by the international research community for more than 60 years.”
This is a multi-year engagement valued at $48,265,314 over the next 5 years. The resource currently contains over 3.5 million samples from more than 200,000 individuals with psychiatric illness and neurotypical controls. Under this new contract, Coriell will be responsible for a wide range of critical tasks to safeguard, sustain, enhance, and enrich the NRGR, including managing the addition of approximately sixteen thousand new biological samples and data to the resource and distribution of over twelve thousand samples to the research community each year.
The goal of the NRGR is to accelerate scientific understanding of the genetic and cellular bases of mental disorders and support translational neuroscience that will lead to new diagnostic tools, treatments, and preventive strategies for mental illnesses. Since its inception in 1989, the NRGR has distributed more than one million samples to more than 450 investigators worldwide and has supported approximately 1,800 genetic research studies on mental illness.
Coriell has hosted NIH sponsored public biobanks since 1972 and the NRGR will join several other NIH sponsored collections at the Institute, two of which have celebrated over 50 years of operations at Coriell. Coriell has significantly contributed to NIH’s ability to meet its critical public health mission, as evidenced by its decade long stewardship of several prominent NIH sample and data repositories which have played critical roles in advancing biology and the life sciences and treating and curing disease.
“Coriell’s reputation and success in operating significant repository collections speak for themselves,” added Jean-Pierre Issa, M.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of the Coriell Institute. “This new contract reflects the expertise we have cultivated over the past six decades, and we are proud to expand Coriell’s mission to unlock the underlying genetic causes of disease in the field of psychiatric disorders.”
This project has been funded in whole with Federal funds from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No.75N95025C00007. Federal funding represents 100% of the total project costs. | 