Learning To Share in New York City

Courtesy of Kelly Guenther MOLECULAR DYNAMIC DUO: David Cowburn, president and CEO at the New York Structural Biology Center, and Willa Appel, executive vice president and COO. Ann E. McDermott, a Columbia University chemist, encountered a career crisis a little more than four years ago. Her cramped campus couldn't facilitate the kind of technology she needed to remain at the top of her field. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers require money and space. Money was available. Real estate was scarce. "I couldn't ask them to put a whole new building up," she quips. Loath to leave her valued colleagues in the region, McDermott says she was even asking friends how hard it would be to swap fields. Richard A. Rifkind, then dean of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, says McDermott was not the only New York City scientist contemplating change: "We were about to lose several major figures in the NMR spectroscopy field." Enter Willa Appel and the business lobby group, New York Partnership. Through talking to universities to determine what might prevent a biotech brain drain from the Big Apple, the solution became clear: sharing resources to purchase pricey lab equipment. In the depths of her professional predicament, McDermott recalls an encounter with Appel as salvation. "The question [was] phrased: 'How about if you have only a fraction of an instrument, but it's very conveniently located and it causes you to meet people you otherwise want to meet?'" McDermott relates. With support from the Partnership, Appel, now the center's executive vice president and chief operating officer, would help solve McDermott's equipment shortage by building the New York Structural Biology Center (NYSBC), a well-stocked lab shared by 10 New York institutions. Housed in a long-unused gym on Harlem's City College campus, the NYSBC provides its member institutions access to a growing stable of high-end instruments for studies in structural biology. The center also supplies a recruitment tool and venue for collaboration. Organizers hope it will eventually bolster the city's weak biotech and pharma presence. HOW TO GROW A LAB When the Partnership began the project in the late 1990s, the idea was to make cutting-edge technology available. Each institution would have essentially half of a high-field (750 MHz or greater) NMR spectrometer, and the institution's share of the equipment would cost less than half the actual cost of the instrument. In the late 1990s, Appel took the hat around, raising $9 million in capital funds from Columbia University, Sloan-Kettering, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York University, Rockefeller University, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and the Wadsworth Center of the Department of Health in Albany. City University of New York donated funds and a dollar-a-year lease for 40 years at its City College gymnasium. And by the time the NYSBC opened in December 2002, organizers had raised $50 million in state, federal, and local funds, says Appel. Researchers, including McDermott, were involved throughout planning stages, and they helped shape some of the center's focuses: defining the structures of small-molecule, ligand-binding domains, and resolving membrane-bound proteins, for example. Collaborations are cropping up among the more than 20 NMR laboratories. "When you have equipment, a lot of collaborations evolve," says Robert G. Griffin, director of the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory, a 30-year-old center for NMR research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Organizers say the Harlem neighborhood also may be ripe for biotech development. Empty warehouses would offer the real estate necessary, and Columbia's biotechnology incubator, the Audubon Center for Biomedicine, resides only a few subway stops to the north. "We would love to see commercial exploitation of the discoveries in the center, and we would love to see it stimulate biotech development in New York," Appel says. Even if the biotech draw does not work, the technology may be bait to academics. Mark Girvin from Albert Einstein says researchers seeking everything from faculty to graduate student positions mention the center as a positive selling point. Louise Mirrer, executive vice chancellor at City College, says the institution plans to recruit scientists for structural biology research. "In the past, we never really contemplated that we could attract [these] scientists." Brendan A. Maher can be contacted at bmaher@the-scientist.com.

Learning To Share in New York City

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