Gene bank. THE Eli Broad Business (left) is pledging $ 100 million to a new institute, led by Eric Lander (right).
Supported by a billionaire entrepreneur and two prestigious universities, a team of scientists is preparing to take a big leap beyond the human genome. Today, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University unveiled plans for a new institute designed to transform genetic research in clinical medicine. The institute is supplied with an initial commitment of $ 100 million Eli Broad, a Los Angeles businessman, and will be led by Eric Lander, head of the center of the genome-MIT Whitehead Institute in Cambridge.
The Broad Institute has emerged after two years of difficult negotiations on financing, location and organization ( science 21 December 01, p. 2451). Broad may be best known in Los Angeles as an art lover. But he also invested millions of dollars in a laboratory of biological sciences at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
In addition to Broad $ 100 million commitment, MIT and Harvard have pledged to mobilize up to $ 0 million more in the next decade. The Broad Institute will aim to bring together specialists in more than half a dozen disciplines for understanding the cell and use genetic information to create tools in the fight against cancer, diabetes and inflammatory and infectious diseases. The ambitious effort will be based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a dozen professors and 30 associated members of the faculty will be supported by a starting budget of $ 30 million per year. Unlike Whitehead, the Broad Institute will not be an independent entity; MIT will administer on behalf of the partners.
Broad Institute leaders have not yet managed to bring the private sector into the picture. Novartis, the pharmaceutical company based in Basel, has moved its R & D center in Cambridge last year and expressed interest in joining this partnership. Negotiators failed to agree before the MoU was signed last week, however. Mark Fishman, director of biomedical research at Novartis, said that "we want to be part of these things, and this is just one of the possible ways." Lander and Stuart Schreiber, a Harvard chemist who will be part of the faculty foundation, said the new institute will focus on the need to make data available for free, and they predict that companies understand the need to collaborate openly.
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