NEW YORK, June 20 - The Blueprint Initiative said today that it has secured CA$29 million ($21.3 million) in public and private funding to expand the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database, BIND.
The funding comes from Genome Canada, the Ontario Government's Research and Development Challenge Fund, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Sun Microsystems, MDS Proteomics, and Foundry Networks. It is contingent on certain milestones and will go towards software development, database curation, computer hardware, and networking.
Blueprint, led by Christopher Hogue at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto, currently has a staff of 59 - including 12 database curators and 29 software developers - and is slated to grow to 77 by the year 2005. Its scientific advisory group will be announced in the next few weeks.