New York Genome Center opens $54 million facility in Manhattan

The New York Genome Center celebrated the official opening Thursday of its $54 million, 170,000-square-foot facility in Manhattan.

The new facility will house 16 member institutions that include academic and industry leaders in a collaboration that is focused on medical research.

“The opening of the New York Genome Center is a major achievement in the city's ongoing efforts to advance the bioscience sector in New York City—part of our commitment to diversify the city's economy and create jobs,” said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is scheduled to take part in the ribbon cutting ceremony. “The Genome Center's new facility and its groundbreaking approach to collaboration will help solve some of medicine's most challenging problems by bringing together the city's best academic and clinical institutions.”

The occasion marks the start of the center's inaugural two-day scientific symposium, which will feature a host of speakers who will discuss the importance of genomics—the analysis, assembly and sequencing of DNA within a cell—toward the detection, diagnosis and treatment of human disease.

“No other city in the world has the breadth of scientific talent, healthcare delivery systems and demographically diverse population that can be found in New York,” said Russ Carson, co-chair of the center's board of directors. “The New York Genome Center will be a catalyst to promote greater interaction and collaboration among the city's premier institutions and scientists by integrating basic research, diagnosis and clinical care. Collectively, this consortium has the potential to effectively change the paradigm in medicine by incorporating genomics across the spectrum of their activities.”

Launched in November 2011, NYGC has undertaken a number of research studies, including a project that began last year that looks at Alzheimer's sequencing. The center recently announced the addition of the New York Stem Cell Foundation as an associate member, which will collaborate toward the advancement of stem-cell research.

“Collaboration is essential for solving the most complex and difficult problems in biomedical science,” said Dr. Tom Maniatis, chair of NYGC's Scientific and Clinical Steering Committee. “I have been involved from the beginning in a citywide effort to create a consortium that effectively marshals the resources, identifies the critical questions and creates the environment to tackle problems that are too big for individual researchers or institutions to solve alone. By bringing together some of the best minds in science and the intellectual diversity represented in New York into the NYGC consortium, we believe that we can push forward the boundaries of biomedical science in an unprecedented manner.”

An independent and not-for-profit consortium of research facilities, NYGC members include Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York-Presbyterian Hospital and The Rockefeller University.

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