“We are extremely excited to be the first site for NYGC’s Innovation Center, through which we are gaining access to this technology,” Thomas J. Kelly, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, said in a press release. “We believe the system will greatly accelerate the rate at which we can collect information about the molecular changes in DNA that give rise to diseases such as cancer, enabling us to better exploit this information to develop more effective therapeutic strategies in the future.”  

 

The NYGC has set aside capital and operating budgets for its new center for the purchase of next-generation sequencing technology, which will allow its scientists to test and publish on the technologies. An NYGC laboratory located at The Rockefeller University will house some of the Innovation Center’s sequencing and data analysis until the facility’s doors officially open next year.

 

“We believe the adoption of technologies and ultimately the advancement of science and medicine is about building connections and this is what NYGC is trying to do,” Nancy J. Kelley, JD, MPP, founding executive director of the NYGC, said in a press release. “The NYGC Innovation Center is serving as a broker of relationships to bring new technologies forward, of which Life Technologies’ Ion Proton Sequencer is the first.”  

 

Mark Stevenson, president and chief operating officer of Life Technologies, said that the company wants industry leading institutions to be able to access their technology, and add that the company is “pleased that the New York Genome Center has joined a growing list of prestigious, research-focused hospitals and institutions around the world that are rapidly adopting our Ion semiconductor sequencing technology.”  

 

“Like our other customers, we believe NYGC will benefit from this disruptive technology by being able to rapidly generate accurate genomic data quickly and apply it to human disease research,” said Stevenson in a press release.   Scott Lowe, Ph.D, a biologist, member of the Cancer Biology & Genetics Program at Sloan-Kettering Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, studies a variety of cancers that are difficult to treat, and noted that he expects the technology will grant his team the ability to more quickly examine genetics mutations that take place in the cancers, understand how said mutations affect a patient’s response to therapy and identify cancer-specific targets.    

 

 

SOURCE: NYGC press release