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COLLABORATION Harvard, MIT Announce Institute To Advance Genomic Medicine Leaders of Harvard and MIT announced on June 19 the establishment of the Broad Institute, to be composed of interdisciplinary researchers dedicated to developing tools for genomic medicine, making them widely available, and applying them to clinical care. The new institute, a collaboration of Harvard, MIT, Whitehead Institute, and several Harvard teaching hospitals, was created through a founding gift from Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road), estimated to total $100 million over 10 years. The institute will be directed by Eric Lander, founder and director of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, who, in addition to his MIT and Whitehead appointments, is expected to join the HMS faculty in the fall. Among the leaders at the press conference announcing the Broad Institute are (l to r) Eric Lander, Eli Broad, Lawrence Summers, and Charles Vest. (Photo by Justin Ide, Harvard University News Office) Breadth and Specificity "This is real collaboration backed by real resources," said Harvard president Lawrence Summers during the press conference. "What's special here is that the resources are available thanks to the Broads' generosity to actually bring people together and enable them to do things they otherwise would not have done.... It will enable us in a way that I believe is unique to combine the advantages of scale with the advantages of flexibility." The Broad Institute will begin operation in Kendall Square, Cambridge, later this year, pooling from its three founding institutions expertise in molecular biology, genomics, chemistry and chemical biology, computational science, engineering, and medicine. The aim will be to amass the complete information sets, lab reagents, and analytical methods needed to study human biology and disease processes. These tools will enable researchers to understand and monitor all genes and proteins in an organism and to establish their role and interactions in disease, to understand human genetic variation and its association with disease susceptibility, and to define the wiring diagram of cellular circuitry and its malfunction in disease. More specifically, investigations will home in on the molecular basis of cancer; metabolic disorders, including diabetes, obesity, and heart disease; and inflammatory and infectious diseases. "This is real collaboration backed by real resources." --Lawrence Summers The organization of the institute will also operate on macro and micro levels, including both individual research laboratories and larger, team-based programs to produce and apply genomic tools. Scientists at all stages of their careers will be involved. A key goal will be to invigorate the next generation of young scientists in Boston and beyond, by providing access to the most powerful concepts and tools of genomics. As Lander said, "The Broad Institute has an organizational vision to match its scientific mission. It is to empower the next generation of biomedical scientists by providing a setting in which they can come together to tackle those larger collaborative projects that can't really be done in a traditional setting." Institute Faculty The institute's faculty will grow to 12 core members and about 30 associated members from MIT, Harvard, and Whitehead. The core faculty will be appointed on a long-term basis and will lead major programs within the institute, while associated faculty will be appointed on a rotating basis. The initial core faculty in addition to Lander will include Howard Hughes investigator Stuart Schreiber, the Morris Loeb professor and chair of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University; David Altshuler, HMS assistant professor of genetics and of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Howard Hughes associate investigator Todd Golub, HMS associate professor of pediatrics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital. In addition to the gift from Eli Broad, founder and chairman of SunAmerica, and his wife, Edythe, who are philanthropists based in Los Angeles, the Broad Institute will work with MIT and Harvard to raise up to $200 million in private support for research programs over the next decade. Joining Summers, Lander, and Eli Broad on the panel announcing the institute were MIT president Charles Vest, Brigham and Women's Hospital president Gary Gottlieb, and Whitehead director Susan Lindquist.