The BeHEARD (Helping Empower and Accelerate Research Discoveries) Challenge is hosted annually by the Rare Genomics Institute and is open globally to researchers, foundations, or anyone whose research is constrained due to limited resources. It provides technology and financial grants for rare disease research. Families with a child afflicted with a rare disease have the opportunity to work with a network of academic researchers to develop research proposals tailored to advancing treatments for their child’s disease.

We just heard that our group won the technology prize in the 2017/18 competition. The prize is a vector constructed by Cyagen (worth $8,950) which will be used to generate a conditional knock-out mouse model that will greatly enhance our sudies of skeletal dysplasias. We are very grateful for this prize and we’re looking forward to the exciting project ahead!