NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — The New York Genome Center has signed a 20-year lease for 170,000 square feet of space in a high rise in downtown Manhattan, the institute said today.
The NYGC will occupy seven floors within the building, an office tower at 101 Sixth Avenue. Construction for the facilities will begin this month at an estimated cost of $47 million and is expected to be completed by mid-2013.
Edward J. Minskoff Equities, the building's landlord, will provide almost $9 million in tenant improvements for the building.
The facility will have sequencing, bioinformatics, and research labs as well as an Innovation Center for new technologies and computing infrastructure. It will also include a ground-floor auditorium and café, training facilities, and administrative offices.
In addition, the NYGC has established an offsite data center at the Sabey Intergate.Manhattan facility at 375 Pearl Street. According to the center, the Intergate.Manhattan is New York City's only purpose-built data center and has a highly secure location that is guarded by both the New York Police Department and Department of Homeland Security personnel.
The center will initially have 100 employees, a number that is expected to grow to more than 500 over the following five years.
The NYGC is already operational through a pilot lab at Rockefeller University that opened earlier this month.
In February, the center announced its first project, a collaboration with the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research and Illumina to study the genomes of 1,000 Alzheimer's disease patients.
In April, the center said that it planned to start recruiting bioinformatics and sequencing specialists with a $3 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Founded in August 2010 and officially launched last fall, the NYGC is an independent non-profit institute that plans to become one of the largest genomic facilities in North America.
The center has 11 institutional founding members: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Columbia University, Cornell University/Weill Cornell Medical College, the Jackson Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York University/NYU School of Medicine, North Shore-LIJ Health System, The Rockefeller University, and Stony Brook University. The Hospital for Special Surgery is an associate founding member.
In addition, the center has two corporate collaborators at the moment, Illumina and Roche.
To date, the NYGC has raised more than $115 million from its institutional founding members; philanthropies such as the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies; and other strategic relationships, including the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the New York City Investment Fund.
For more details on the new NYGC facility, please see In Sequence's coverage here.