As early as February of 2012, project organizers plan on opening the New York Genome Center, a new center for genomics and medicine, in Manhattan. NYGC’s collaborating members include a number of public and private contributors, among them 11 academic institutions, private philanthropists, technology collaborators, the New York City Economic Corporation and the New York City Investment Fund. In total, contributing members have donated $120 million to the project so far.
Some of the NYGC participating research institutions are:
- Columbia University
- Cornell University
- Mount Sinai Medical Center
- Rockefeller University
NYGC began as something of a personal mission for Nancy Kelley, the center’s founding executive director. In an interview with Bio-IT World, Kelley says she began working on the project with Columbia Univeristy’s Tom Maniatis and Sloan Kettering Institute Director Thomas Kelley with nothing but a cell phone and a Hotmail account.
(Image courtesy of http://nygenome.org)
Fifteen months and $120 million dollars later, some people point to the center’s already escalating success as an indicator that genomics will play a major role in medical research in the future. In an article by Drug Discovery & Development, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Eric Green, says that NYGC is "poised to make genomic medicine a reality."
The organization of so many collaborators to create the center is really an extraordinary feat. As to what the future holds, Kelley says in an interview with Bio-IT World that the vision for NYGC is “to achieve transformational results for healthcare and research… For a long time, [New York has] had the leading global institutions in healthcare, but for whatever reason, haven’t always come together to collaborate and leverage that strength. With this enterprise, it will allow them to do that and take their role on the global stage -- as they should be.”
(Image courtesy of http://nygenome.org)
Kelley says Maniati played a key role in the creation of the center, and she also commended Craig Thompson and Marc Tessier-Lavigne for their work in transforming this vision into a reality. The Simons Foundation was the first major philanthropic donor, giving a $20 million matching challenge grant, and the Bloomberg Philanthropies have donated $2.5 million. The exceptional success the NYGC has already experienced in its fundraising will hopefully be a predictor of success in the future.
Biotechnology Calendar, Inc. is an event marketing and planning company that organizes on-campus science research tradeshows at universities nationwide. If you are a scientist or lab supplier looking to network at Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center, Rockefeller University or Mount Sinai School of Medicine, come to one of our 2012 tradeshows in New York. You can register online here.