The New York Genome Center (NYGC) launched a collaborative venture in genomic medicine with eleven private and academic medical centers.
NYGC’s collaborating academic medical centers and research universities include Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Columbia University, Cornell University/Weill Cornell Medical College, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York University/NYU School of Medicine, North Shore-LIJ Health System, The Jackson Laboratory, The Rockefeller University and Stony Brook University. The Hospital for Special Surgery is an associate founding member.
The medical institutions, along with technology and pharmaceutical innovators, have come together behind NYGC with the goal of accelerating progress toward a new era of genomic research and having an impact on patient care and clinical outcomes in the near future.
“The commitment of 11 leading New York research and healthcare centers to form the New York Genome Center shows the prominent role that genomics will play in the future of medical research and clinical care,” says Eric D. Green, MD, PhD, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. “The new center is poised to help make genomic medicine a reality.”
The Center will begin operations as early as Spring 2012. Its 120,000-square-foot facility, designed by Elkus Manfredi Architects, will be located in Manhattan.
Through this collaboration, scientists and physicians from member institutions will share clinical and genomic data to discover the molecular underpinnings of disease, identify and validate biomarkers, and accelerate development of novel diagnostics and targeted therapeutics to improve clinical care.
“The New York Genome Center will provide the opportunity for basic scientists and physicians from extraordinary universities, research institutions and hospitals to work together to transform the complexity of genomic information into an understanding and treatment of human diseases,” says Thomas Maniatis, PhD, chair of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University, one of the founding institutions.
NYGC will offer an initial technology platform of next-generation sequencers and will scale up to be operational within a year. Its facility will house laboratory space for principal investigators, sequencing instrumentation, robotics for high-throughput library preparation, IT storage hardware for buffering and final data storage, bioinformatics, and computational capabilities.
NYGC hopes to interface with computational capabilities at academic and medical institutions in order to allow collaboration among institutions and scientists. Collaborative training programs are also planned to expand recruitment and development of genomics and bioinformatics researchers and clinicians in the New York area,
Release Date: Nov. 3, 2011
Source: New York Genome Center
