New Center for Biomedical Technology

Stewart Bros. Photographers, Inc. Future site of the HHMI's collaborative research campus. New laboratories will be located in the lower left; the institute will occupy portions of the three office buildings pictured to the right. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation's largest privately held funder of biomedical research, has announced plans to build a major new high-tech laboratory facility. The 10-year, $500 million plan includes a biomedical science center for technology development complete with on-site housing and labs for 200 to 300 staff members--approximately 24 investigators and their research staffs. Construction will begin in early 2003 and the facility should be completed by mid-2005. Late last year, HHMI, which is headquartered in Chevy Chase, Md., purchased 281 acres of farmland located in nearby Loudoun County, Va., outside Washington, D.C., for $53.7 million. The planned center will be HHMI's first "in-house" facility owned and operated entirely by HHMI; the institute currently remotely funds 350 investigators at more than 70 universities and other research institutions in the United States. Although research area specifics have not been finally determined, HHMI president Tom Cech and vice president for science development David Clayton anticipate cutting edge projects in areas including proteomics, imaging, computational biology, chemical synthesis, and robotics. They hesitate to give further details, expecting that biomedical technologies will evolve considerably by the time the new facility opens its doors. New leadership at HHMI, including Cech, who came on in January 2000,1 decided to fund the mammoth project despite a slowing U.S. economy. Last year, the institute, which has an annual budget of $660 million, had only a 1.5 percent return on its $12 billion endowment, which is invested primarily in the stock market. The typical return in the last several years has been about 8 percent. Nevertheless, endowment growth has allowed the institute to expand its spending, and HHMI leadership and trustees elected to support the new campus rather than increase the number of remotely funded investigators. Even if the economy takes a downturn, models of market conditions suggest that neither the new campus nor other programs will be affected, says Clayton. Tom Cech Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory director Bruce Stillman points out that establishing such large programs with NIH funding, the prototypical lifeblood of universities and institutions like Cold Spring Harbor, can be difficult because such programs require substantial money up front. "Hughes has the resources to not only build the buildings," says Stillman, who's also a member of the HHMI scientific advisory board, "but fund an ongoing program in areas that could be very beneficial to the scientific community." He cites one potential expensive and experimental project: the development of whole-body imaging technology for use in the diagnosis of diseases like cancer. New interdisciplinary, technology-driven bioscience initiatives have been commonplace recently--for example: University of California, Berkeley's Health Sciences Initiative, Princeton University's Institute for Genomic Analysis, and the University of California, San Francisco's planned 43-acre Mission Bay campus specializing in structural, cell, and developmental biology research. "The difference for us is we have the money in hand," says Clayton of the new HHMI facility. "So we can go ahead full steam without worrying about gathering funding from ... any other sources." According to Cech, the research focus of the new HHMI center will not deviate significantly from similar initiatives at other universities and institutions. However, the implementation of the programs at the Loudoun County site, says Cech, will share features of only a select few institutions--Cold Spring Harbor has been mentioned as one model. The HHMI plans to hire engineers, mathematicians, and physicists for biology-based research at the new campus as necessary, a move that would be logistically difficult at most biology departments and medical schools. No research project will explicitly aim to create intellectual property, as do some initiatives at other centers. As with all current HHMI investigators, campus staff will have rolling five-year appointments; shorter collaborative efforts involving both HHMI and outside investigators will also be encouraged. By continuously reviewing research projects, HHMI leadership hopes to encourage more fresh faces and a higher degree of research flexibility than is often the case at universities with tenured positions. "We're going to be able to provide stable funding with a longer term commitment than most other places would be able to make," says Cech. He adds that the center, like all HHMI programs, will take more risks on unproven, experimental research than would a grant-based program. Given the current high demand for computational biologists and bioinformatics specialists, Cech notes that the HHMI is not trying to "out-compete anybody," but rather make several institutions more competitive by offering their researchers access to hard-to-find, state-of-the-art technology. Stillman hopes that whatever the eventual incarnation of the Loudoun County campus, HHMI is indeed careful not to establish programs that will compete with other institutions, including Cold Spring Harbor. Says Stillman, "I think they will have the sensitivity to develop programs that will be unique, given that their resources are unique." Eugene Russo can be contacted at erusso@the-scientist.com 1. E. Russo, "Making an impact" The Scientist, 14[21]:1, Oct. 30, 2000.

New Center for Biomedical Technology

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