National Facility for Gene Function in Health and Disease

The National Facility for Gene Function in Health and Disease (NFGFHD) has been set up at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. 

National Facility for Gene Function in Health and Disease (NFGFHD):

• It is built by IISER Pune and supported by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) at a total cost of about Rs 45 crore.
• It is 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.
• There are facilities for making embryonic stem cell-based models and traditional transgenic mice models, embryo and sperm cryopreservation, and in-vitro fertilisation.
• Mission: Establishment of state of art facility for maintenance and generation of transgenic models that will act as a national repository of animal models for Indian academic and Industrial R&D centres.
• Salient Features:
  • Individually ventilated caging system for breeding and housing  rodents
  • Live animal Bio-Imaging system for small rodents 
  • Facilities for behavioural phenotyping of rodents, zebrafish and drosophila  
  • Well-equipped genome editing laboratory
  • NFGFHD facility is generously supported by the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology

Need:

• With a growing zoonotic disease burden on human health, there is an increased urgency to perform disease studies based on physiological evidence and methods.
• Since human trials alone cannot suffice for such studies, the need for having experimental setups using animal models has become imperative.
• Hence, animal, plant and microorganism-based models are now being significantly deployed to study diseases in a time-bound manner.