NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The New York Genome Center said today that it has received a $125 million joint gift from the Simons Foundation and the Carson Family Charitable Trust.
The gift, which will be awarded over the next five years, will support the building and maintenance of the NYGC's genomics infrastructure, allowing it to establish collaborative research programs in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases and in cancer with its institutional founding members.
The Simons Foundation, chaired by Jim Simons, an NYGC board member, is contributing $100 million, while the Carson Family Charitable Trust, led by Russell Carson, co-chair of the NYGC board, is giving $25 million to the center. Simons and Carson both helped establish the NYGC in 2011.
"This new gift will make it possible to accelerate research into our key disease focus areas, leveraging our strengths in whole-genome sequencing, computational analyses, and development of new genomic tools," Tom Maniatis, NYGC's scientific director and CEO, said in a statement.
"A gift to the NYGC is an investment in the future of scientific discovery," Simons said. "The Center fosters the collaborative work essential to making discoveries that will strengthen research capabilities and propel genomic science forward."
"The NYGC plays a critical role as a collaborative hub, tapping into and harnessing the multidisciplinary, multi-institutional expertise of researchers from New York and across the country," Carson said. "We hope this gift will inspire others to contribute to the Center and invest in its work."
The size of the gift is similar to the $100 million contribution that Eli and Edythe Broad made in 2013 to the Cambridge, Massachusetts research institute and genome center that bears their name. In total, the couple gave $700 million to the Broad Institute between 2004 and 2013.