Generous Gift Spurs Cancer Research

September 23, 2006

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By Constance Holden

ScienceNOW Daily News

22 September 2006

With a new $100-million private donation, five institutions in New York and

Boston will combine their genetic, technological, and clinical firepower to

bring the assault on cancer to a new stage, scientists announced yesterday.

The Starr Foundation, a large New York-based philanthropy interested in health

and education, is donating $20 million-a-year over 5 years to a consortium

comprising The Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cold Spring

Harbor Laboratory, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller

University and Weill Cornell Medical College, all in New York. The five

institutions represent immense and varied cancer-fighting resources, with large

populations of patients and tissue banks at Cornell and Sloan-Kettering, strong

basic research at Rockefeller, and advanced genomic technologies at Broad and

Cold Spring Harbor.

Heads of the institutions say the money is particularly welcome now that funding

from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has declined for the past 3 years.

And the time is ripe for rapid progress, says Kandel, director of the Broad

Institute. " With the completion of the Human Genome Project and development of a

wide range of tools based on it, you can now talk about making systematic

functional attacks on cancer, " he says. Bruce Stillman, director of Cold Spring

Harbor, says scientists have not only an explosion of genetic information but

new, genetically-tailored mouse models for cancer that were unheard of even a

decade ago. " We see this as just the beginning of what may become a sea change

in how we do cancer research, " he says.

The money still won't make up for NIH funding that is not keeping up with

inflation, says Sloan-Kettering director Harold Varmus. " But it will allow

people to be innovative in an era of diminishing resources… We're all quite

thrilled by this. "

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