SEATTLE--The University of Washington, in collaboration with Orchid Biocomputer, a bioinformatics company headquartered in Princeton, NJ, announced it will establish a new Institute for Quantitative Systems Biology here. Leroy Hood, chair of the university's molecular biology department, will oversee the project.

The institute will be among the first to utilize Orchid's new SNPstream system, automated genotyping technology that enables researchers to score up to 30,000 genotypes per day for pharmacogenetic analysis of clinical sample sequencers.