NEW YORK, Nov. 23 (GenomeWeb News) - The Blueprint Initiative, a non-profit research program based at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Toronto's Mt. Sinai Hospital, has "fully expended available core funding in both Canada and Singapore," according to a notice on its website, and will stop curating the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND).
"No further funding is available at this time," the notice reads, adding that curation activities for the database have been "terminated."
Chris Hogue, principal investigator for the Blueprint Initiative, told GenomeWeb News that the project, which once employed as many as 70 curators in
In May, the Blueprint Initiative learned that its funding from Genome
But Hogue said today that the initiative's
In the meantime,
In the notice on the BIND website, Hogue notes that "public databases are essential requirements for the future of life sciences research. The question arises will these be free or will they require a subscription. Should BIND/Blueprint be sustained as a public-funded open-access database and service provider?"
Hogue told GenomeWeb News that he would consider commercializing the database, but only as a "last resort" because he'd prefer to see BIND remain in the public domain.
"We're trying to do everything we can so we don't have to close those doors," he said.