About the ModelMatcher Team

Our goal is to bring all rare disease stakeholders together. A team of basic scientists, bioinformaticians and clinicians in the US and Canada are jointly developing ModelMatcher, a global matchmaking platform designed to facilitate collaborations focused on studying rare and undiagnosed diseases.

Expanding Collaborations Worldwide

National funding programs already exist which facilitate clinician and scientist collaborations that study rare or undiagnosed diseases in model organisms. These consortia have been productive and successful. Unfortunately, the number of collaborations is limited by the lack of an international clinician-scientist matchmaking platform. Our goal is to maximize collaborative research by expanding these networks to include patients, funding groups and advocacy groups from all over the world.

Developing Collaborations to Help Patients

Patients with rare diseases often experience painstakingly long diagnostic odysseys. State-of-the-art genome sequencing technologies may provide answers in about a third of cases. The rest are often left with only a list candidate genes. Identifying which gene causes disease, and creating effective therapies, requires an understanding of disease mechanism. Collaboration between scientists, patients and clinicians is therefore critical to streamlining diagnosis and translational research of rare genetic diseases. When the entire rare disease community works together, we can discover disease mechanisms, inform treatment decisions, and create opportunities for translational research!

Building ModelMatcher

ModelMatcher is being developed based on the successful open source RDMM software. ModelMatcher also integrates valuable information obtained from human and model organism databases using the MARRVEL tool to facilitate cross-disciplinary research.

Citing ModelMatcher

When referring to ModelMatcher, please cite the following preprint article in BioRxiv.

ModelMatcher: A scientist-centric online platform to facilitate collaborations between stakeholders of rare and undiagnosed disease research

J. Michael Harnish, Lucian Li, Sanja Rogic, Guillaume Poirier-Morency, Seon-Young Kim, Undiagnosed Diseases Network, Kym M. Boycott, Michael F. Wangler, Hugo J. Bellen, Philip Hieter, Paul Pavlidis, Zhandong Liu, Shinya Yamamoto. bioRxiv 2021.09.30.462504; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.30.462504