Novo Nordisk Foundation renews commitment to investigate genomic mechanisms of disease at Broad Institute in collaboration with Danish scientists

The Novo Nordisk Foundation has committed $53 million to renew and expand the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanisms of Disease at the Broad Institute, led by managing director Kasper Lage. This funding will scale up the Center's transatlantic efforts to decode the biological drivers of type 2 diabetes and obesity and identify new targets for potential therapies by combining massive-scale data generation, artificial intelligence, and advanced cellular models.

“We’re deeply grateful for the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s continued commitment to advancing science through international collaboration. By bringing complementary capabilities in the U.S. and Denmark to bear on flagship projects, we expect to make enormous progress against diabetes and obesity,” said Todd Golub, the director of the Broad Institute. “We’re seeing an extraordinary moment in science where technology advances are enabling us to tackle major public health challenges and find new treatments that are grounded in biology. But no single lab, institution, or country can do it alone. By creating joint teams in Boston and Denmark, we can take on even more ambitious goals.”

“Cardiometabolic diseases including diabetes and obesity are the leading cause of death globally. Yet we still don’t understand enough about the biological mechanisms that drive them,” said Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, CEO at the Novo Nordisk Foundation. “By uniting Denmark’s world-class expertise in metabolic and population research with the Broad’s unparalleled genomic and computational capabilities, we’re already seeing advances that might not otherwise have been possible. I’m pleased that our Foundation is continuing its support for this unique collaboration, which shows how long-term investment in excellent science and strong international partnerships can create exciting opportunities for discovery.”

From genetic discovery to biological understanding

Around 590 million people live with diabetes worldwide, while one billion people live with obesity. Both numbers are expected to rise sharply in the coming decade. Although new medications are effective for many people, others do not respond to them. Researchers need to understand the genetics of both conditions in order to uncover new drug targets. Thousands of genetic variants have been linked to diabetes and obesity, but understanding the biology has remained a major challenge.  

Since its launch in 2021 with a grant of $47.5 million from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Center has cultivated a robust, transatlantic ecosystem that benefits all institutions involved, fostering deep collaborations across 18 research groups and more than 120 scientists. It has also hosted more than 37 Danish researchers through an active exchange program. As a result, it has become a global leader in developing methods and technologies to map how genetic variants drive metabolic disease. New tools and technologies created through this collaboration include:

• The most comprehensive cellular and genomic resource for metabolic disease to date
• Scalable new technologies for variant-to-function research
• Foundational datasets linking genetics to cellular biology
• Advanced tools for large-scale genetic discovery across diverse populations

Kasper Lage, manager director, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanisms of Disease at the Broad Institute

“With this renewed commitment, we're moving from building the foundation to deploying it at unprecedented scale,” said Lage. “Together with our colleagues in Denmark, we want to move from identifying genetic associations to understanding and ultimately predicting how genetic variation changes human biology. By combining human genetics, large-scale experimentation, and AI, we have an opportunity to uncover entirely new disease mechanisms and therapeutic opportunities for type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related metabolic diseases.”

The Center’s efforts have also helped to underscore how diabetes and obesity are not single conditions, but can each be broken down into distinct genetic subtypes. “This kind of discovery opens the field up to a much larger array of potential therapeutic targets that can hopefully one day help millions of people,” said Melina Claussnitzer, co-director of Flagship Disease Projects at the Center, and Institute Member at the Broad where she directs the diabetes initiative.

A new phase of genetic and computational research

The Center will expand on these foundational discoveries through two highly integrated research programs: the Human Gene Regulation Map, which investigates how genetic variants affect programs and circuits in the cell that cause disease, and Flagship Disease Projects, which look at disease biology from the perspective of protein-coding genes, pathways, and cellular functions. Over the next five years, researchers will aim to create hundreds of millions of detailed cell profiles, including from fat cells and brain cells grown from stem cells.

This massive dataset will be used to train specialized AI programs that can predict how DNA changes disrupt cellular health, helping pinpoint the exact biological causes of metabolic diseases. Training these AI models will require immense computing power, which will be provided by Denmark’s AI supercomputer Gefion, one of the most powerful GPU clusters in the world.

“Scientists have been working for years to understand the genetic variants that raise the risk of diabetes and obesity. That work is still ongoing, but the task now is translating variants into function and then into biology — at scale,” said Ruth Loos, the vice executive director at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen and co-director of the Flagship Disease Projects.

“Emerging AI tools will advance these efforts, but it’s still essential to have high-quality data to train our models — that’s why combining the Broad’s large-scale data generation capabilities with complementary expertise in computational genomics, gene regulation, and genetics across Denmark and the Broad will help ensure that these models produce meaningful insights,” added Robin Andersson, Associate Professor of Bioinformatics and Deputy Head of Department for Research at the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen and co-director of the Human Gene Regulation Map.  

In the coming years, the Center will also launch a comprehensive three-year postdoctoral fellowship program where early-career researchers will split their time between Danish institutions and the Broad.

“The scientific advances we're making today will only have lasting impact if we continue investing in the people who will drive the next generation of discoveries,” said Lage.

The Danish side of the partnership will also be strengthened over the next few years, with benefits for the entire collaboration. Researchers in Denmark will take on co-leadership of the Center’s major research programs and a new office in Denmark will strengthen coordination across the country’s partners.