Construction starts this month on the The New York Genome Center (NYGC) in a LEED Silver-certified building at 101 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. Seven floors, or 170,000 square feet, will be dedicated to the pursuit of genomic research, and the facility's goal is to become the largest research center of its kind in North America.
The $47 million facility, which is expected to be completed by mid-2013, will include sequencing, bioinformatics, and research labs, an innovation center to advance new technologies, and computing infrastructure to handle the processing and storage of massive amounts of new data.The project is expected to initially offer 100 jobs, with 500+ jobs to come in the first five years of operation.
Alzheimer's targeted in first major project
According to a report in Scientific American, one of the center's first projects will be a large-scale whole genome sequencing project to study the genetic basis of susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease in at least dozens of patients' samples, which it will undertake with the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, part of North Shore-LIJ. The data from this effort will be made open access to the scientific community.
Various institutions mainly from the New York area are directly involved with the center. They include: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Columbia University, Cornell University/Weill Cornell Medical College, The Jackson Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, New York University/NYU School of Medicine, North Shore-LIJ Health System, The Rockefeller University, and Stony Brook University. The Hospital for Special Surgery is an Associate Founding Member.