NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced on Tuesday that it has launched the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, a new center focused on early-stage technologies for disease research.
The Merkin Institute is being established with unspecified funding from Heritage Provider Network President and CEO Richard Merkin, who formed the Merkin Institute Fellows program at the Broad in 2012.
"Our vision for the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare is to serve as a scientific connector and stimulator that inspires, identifies, and incubates novel research opportunities to improve how we detect, prevent, and treat disease," Broad's David Liu, who will lead the new institute, said in a statement. "We plan to use Dr. Merkin's support to initiate and test early-stage, high-impact projects — and to help turn these ideas into promising realities for doctors and patients."
Initial projects undertaken at the Merkin Institute are expected to span a variety of fields including genome editing, pathogen detection, cancer diagnostics and monitoring, and data sciences for genomic medicine.