June 27, 2003

Altshuler selected for new genome institute

MGH geneticist and endocrinologist David Altshuler, MD, PhD, (below left), recently was named one of four core faculty members for a new genome research institute. Known as the Broad Institute, the new facility, which is a collaborative effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, will be located in the Kendall Square area of Cambridge.

The Broad Institute will have two main missions: to create comprehensive tools for genomic medicine and make them broadly available to scientists around the world and to pioneer applications of these tools to the study of disease, in order to propel the understanding, diagnosis, prevention and treatment of disease.

The core faculty of the new Broad Institute consists of Altshuler, Eric Lander, a member of MIT and the Whitehead Institute faculty; Stuart Schreiber, the Morris Loeb Professor of Chemistry at Harvard and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute; and Todd Golub, associate professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and director of the cancer genomics program at Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.