Upstate/Downstate

Collaboration amplifies CU's biomedical and clinical research efforts

This is the first in a fall series about collaborations between Cornell's Ithaca and Weill Cornell Medical College campuses.

By Roger Segelken

As big as Cornell is, the challenges of understanding the human genome and translating gene-based discoveries into improved health care are bigger. So Cornell, with its Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and its main campus in Ithaca, joined two other powerhouses of human biomedicine -- Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center -- to form the Tri-Institutional Research Program (TIRP).

Hao Wu, professor of biochemistry at Weill Cornell, shown in a Medical College laboratory, is one of more than 40 members of the Tri-Institutional Research Program's chemical biology section. Photo by Amelia Panico

Founded in 2000 with a $160 million gift, TIRP musters the unique resources of each institution to support biomedical and clinical research to train the next generation of life scientists.

"The challenges -- to grow our basic understanding of human biology and then apply new knowledge to improved health care -- are truly daunting," said Lisa Staiano-Coico, the Weill Cornell Medical College professor of microbiology in surgery who serves as executive director of TIRP. "Sequencing the human genome was a great milestone in the history of science, but we know the function of only a small fraction of our genes. We have to develop new computer-based tools to analyze the massive amounts of genetic data that is being generated every day.

"But before we can develop targeted therapeutics for diseases that have a genetic component -- and we're learning that many of them do -- we need a deeper understanding of the chemistry and structure of proteins those genes code for," Staiano-Coico said. She noted that genetically based discovery science requires an array of expensive, sophisticated and rapidly changing technologies that, going it alone, are unaffordable for most individual institutions -- even a Cornell, Rockefeller or Sloan-Kettering.

"Just as important as the machines and technologies are the people -- the human expertise," Staiano-Coico continued. "In an age of specialization, no one institution could specialize in everything. Now, in the age of cooperation and collaboration, the Tri-Institutional Research Program is in the forefront. We've been bridging institutional and disciplinary boundaries since 2000, we've shown how three world-class institutions can become greater than the sum of their parts, and the best is yet to come."

To the collaboration, Cornell in Ithaca brings its excellence in the physical sciences, including chemical biology and biophysics, as well as computer science and engineering. Supporting the physical sciences and engineering in Ithaca are numerous core facilities, such as a nationally designated nanofabrication facility, a protein expression facility and the supercomputer-powered bioinformatics unit of the Cornell Theory Center. Weill Cornell Medical College is well equipped to conduct biomedical and clinical research, with its New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center joins the collaboration with its Sloan-Kettering Institute, which is internationally recognized for pioneering research in structural, cell and developmental biology, and Memorial Hospital, a world leader in biomedical research and cancer care.

And Rockefeller University is an integral part of the collaboration, with its world-renowned research program in structural biology, historic leadership in the areas of cell biology and cancer research, strength in chemical biology and a growing presence in bioinformatics and mathematical biology.

TIRP operates collaborative research programs in three strategic areas -- chemical biology, computational biology, and cancer and developmental biology -- and graduate training programs in two of the same areas -- chemical biology and computational biology: