The goal of the NIH Common Fund's Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) program is to advance technologies and models that will lead to the translation of genome editing into the clinic to create new therapeutic strategies for treating both patients with rare genetic diseases, and those with common diseases. The SCGE Dissemination and Coordinating Center (DCC) will serve as the hub to promote these novel strategies and technologies to design, test, and implement approaches to treat these diseases. The SCGE DCC will support the SCGE Consortium members and work cooperatively with all groups to facilitate their scientific endeavors. To accomplish this goal, the DCC will 1) develop modes of communication for project interaction, 2) build pipelines and processes to collect, integrate, and distribute data through the SCGE Toolkit, and 3) accelerate interactions and collaborations among the groups focused on developing and testing new approaches. The DCC will create the infrastructure for information transfer among SCGE projects, to promote partnerships focused on developing, testing, and validating novel strategies to resolve genetic disorders, and to rapidly disseminate the knowledge from the SCGE to the broader scientific community. To achieve this goal, the DCC will develop a communication structure among the NIH SCGE Working Group and the project leaders, coordinate regular meetings for consortium and subcommittees, build a project management infrastructure, establish a Toolkit to disseminate results, track SCGE Consortium inventory, manage the Collaboration Opportunity Fund to support the SCGE intra-consortium partnerships, and develop educational materials. The DCC team will facilitate the administrative activities to ensure that the scientific discoveries and overall program are successful.
The proposed Dissemination and Coordinating Center (DCC) for the Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) Program will support all activities of the SCGE Program, using the extensive expertise of the team of investigators and program staff. The DCC will coordinate communication, data and resource dissemination, and intra-consortium collaborations. The goal of the DCC is to facilitate and accelerate the transformative research projects to enable new genome editing therapies to improve health and disease.
