Dr. Ariadne Letra is the recipient of a National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) RO3 grant entitled "Leveraging novel methods to improve nonsyndromic cleft lip/palate gene discovery," The $200K grant supports a multi-institutional project involving additional investigators at UTHealth Houston Medical School and UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, that explores novel methods to identify causative genes for cleft lip/palate and assess polygenic risk in the affected families.
Dr. Letra, professor in the Pitt Dental Medicine Departments of Oral and Craniofacial Sciences, Endodontics, and a member of the Center for Craniofacial and Dental Genetics, was part of the team who were awarded a X01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last year. That grant provided about $2M in DNA sequencing services that will include samples of 932 individuals from multigenerational nonsyndromic cleft lip/palate families. The new RO3 grant continues work achieved in last year’s study.