March 21, 2005: On March 15, 2005, 11 leading biomedical organizations announced the formation of a unique $18M, three-year public-private consortium to create a comprehensive library of gene inhibitors to be made available to the entire scientific community. Based on the method of RNA interference (RNAi), this library will give scientists worldwide the tools to knock down expression of virtually all human and mouse genes, accelerating the growth of basic knowledge of gene function in normal physiology and disease.

Called the RNAi Consortium (TRC), the collaborative effort is based at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It includes six MIT- and Harvard-associated research institutions and five international life sciences organizations, among which Novartis is one. Each of the member organizations will contribute $3.6M over three years to support the effort.

The goal of TRC is to use the recently discovered RNAi mechanism to create widely applicable research reagents composed of short RNA hairpin sequences carried in lentiviral vectors. These can be used in a wide range of cellular and animal studies to discover the key genes underlying normal physiology and diseases - including cancer, diabetes and immunological responses. TRC will not only create and validate these reagents, but will make them available to scientists worldwide through commercial and academic distributors.

The members and principal investigators will work together over the three-year period to share expertise about ways to use RNAi technology to speed biomedical research. The project also will develop efficient protocols for preparing DNA and virus stocks of the RNAi reagents and will create methods for performing high-throughput screening with the entire library.

"In order to advance pharmaceutical science, fundamental tools like RNAi need to be made available and accessible to scientists around the world. We're delighted to help make that possible," said Mark Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. "The RNAi Consortium is an excellent example of how industry and academia can work together."