NEWS : National Facility for Gene Function in Health and Disease (NFGFHD) was inaugurated in Pune recently

DETAILS

• The NFGFHD has been set up at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. It has been built by IISER Pune and supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).
• This will be one-of-its-kind large facilities providing timely supply of animal models to researchers studying a range of diseases from cancer to diabetes.
• Rats, mice and rabbits will be housed here, doing away with the need to import them.
• With a growing zoonotic disease burden on human health, there is an increased urgency to perform disease studies based on physiological evidence and methods.
• The facility houses molecular biology laboratories and mico-injection setups to generate mouse models, in which scientists will knock out existing genes and replace them with external or artificial genes that are linked to the disease under study. This is done through CRISPR / Cas9 systems.