Farber Lab
Principal Investigator: Charles R Farber
Institution: University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)
Primary Subfield: Genetics/Genomics
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary: There are over 1 million cases of failed bone repair in the U.S. annually, resulting in substantial patient morbidity and societal costs. The genetic factors affecting bone repair are poorly understood because the field has been limited by having to rely on interrogating genes with known relevance for osteoporosis or other biological processes such as inflammation. These studies have identified only a handful of genes. In contrast, systems genetics studies of many phenotypes including skeletal traits such as bone mineral density have already identified multiple novel genetic variants that can be targeted for therapeutic intervention. Unfortunately, the study of bone repair in patients is not readily amenable to this approach because of the difficulty in enrolling patients in studies after the occurrence of the index event, great variability in injury types and lack of simple readouts to assess repair. These barriers can be overcome by using a model organism with a well-defined injury mechanism and simple readout to characterize the repair phenotype. Thus, we will use systems genetics to discover novel genes influencing intramembranous bone regeneration induced by m…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01AR079179-05: Systems Genetics of Bone Regeneration (2026)
- 5R01AR082880-03: Large-Scale Genetic Analysis of Bone Strength in Diversity Outbred Mice (2026)
- 5R01AR086161-02: Leveraging Context-Specific eQTL to Inform BMD GWAS (2026)
- 5R01AR077992-05: Informing Osteoporosis GWAS Using Networks (2025)
- 5R01AR082880-02: Large-Scale Genetic Analysis of Bone Strength in Diversity Outbred Mice (2025)
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