gms | German Medical Science

The academic and industrial partners form five interacting components (phenotyping, development, genetics, therapy and functional genomics) and these will establish unique working platforms, share tools and knowledge within and outside the academic community, including dissemination through patient organisations (Retina International) and transfer to industrial partners.

This IP, spanning from the biology of seeing to the fight against retinal blindness, will implement an accurate clinical and molecular classification of disease, identify novel retinal genes and pathways and define the context dependent functions of these genes in normal and degenerating tissue. The goal of the EVI-GenoRet consortium is to devise plans for the development of broad scale approaches to integrating biological sciences over the micro- to macro-scales. Therefore, we will employ transcriptome, proteomics, protein-interactome analyses, functional cellular and biochemical assays, bioinformatics and model organisms to analyse patterns of gene expression and gene function in retinal development, normal function and degeneration. The unique knowledge base of molecular networks generated in this way will facilitate identification and validation of novel therapeutic targets, of broad interest.

This project will lead to the integration of unique data resulting from population genetics, clinical and experimental phenotyping, biology of development, as well as functional genomics. At the end, a successful integration of these data in a new type of database will provide clues to systems biology of this complex organ and will enable the group to identify new therapeutic targets with the aim of developing new therapies in due course. Streamlined and standardized procedures for clinical as well as for experimental operations are already being developed.