I should have mentioned in my previous post on HMP funding that the number of grants awarded and the total amount awarded was larger than the original request for applications specified thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) (i.e., the much-debated stimulus). I guess this is another example of ARRA not fixing in four months an economic crisis that was twenty years in the making. I also forgot to mention that we at The Genome Center are collaborating on two other demonstration project grants. In addition to the three I listed in the first post, we are collaborating with J. Dennis Fortenberry, M.D., at IUPUI studying the adolescent male urethral microbiome and its relation to puberty, sexual activity and sexually transmitted disease and Huiying Li, Ph.D., from UCLA studying the association between the skin microbiome and acne. An interesting twist in the Fortenberry study is that the researchers will give the participants cell phones with unlimited text messaging so that they can receive and respond to questions from the researchers on a daily basis rather than keep journals or diaries. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine how giving a teen unlimited text messaging capabilities will skew the study participants and their behavior (but hopefully not their microbiome).

The major funding announcements for the Human Microbiome Project were made public today. Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis really stands out amongst those awarded grants. As the NIH press release indicates, in addition to the The Genome Center‘s $16.1M large-scale sequencing grant (the largest of the sequencing grants), Ellen Li, MD, PhD, Greg Storch, MD, and Phil Tarr, MD, each received about $1M demonstration project grants to study Crohn’s disease, viruses that cause sudden high fevers in children, and necrotizing enterocolitis (a devastating intestinal disease mainly affecting premature infants), respectively. You can find more coverage of the grant announcements at GenomeWeb Daily News and In Sequence and the St. Louis Business Journal.

While HMP pilot projects and “jump start” funding has allowed some of the work to get underway, it really all begins now in earnest. Considering that the human microbiome makes up about 90% of the cells in the human body, i.e., only 10% of the cells in the human body are actually human, unraveling the complex interactions of all these microbes at different body sites is a daunting task. There is already evidence suggesting that the microbiome can affect many aspects of human health, from intestinal disease to gum disease to cancer to obesity. Much like the Human Genome Project paved the way for further medical discoveries, so too will the HMP.