Upstate/Downstate: Access is uppermost for research collaborators in tri-institutional program

This is part of the fall series about collaborations between Cornell's Ithaca and Weill Cornell Medical College campuses.

By Roger Segelken

For biomedical educators who have joined the Tri-Institutional Research Program (TIRP), it's all about access -- access to the technological resources, to potential scientific collaborators and to the top-tier students they need to do their very best work.

Recent recruits to TIRP, which since 2000 has linked the New York City-based Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College with Cornell's Ithaca campus, wisely surveyed the institutional landscape before determining that only one place offers unparalleled access. People who are attracted to a place like TIRP tend to be natural bridge-builders, and they're not likely to stop now.

Weill Cornell Professor Harel Weinstein's Institute for Computational Biomedicine is in a Rockefeller University building. His students do research in Ithaca as well as in New York City. Photo by John Abbott

Take, for example, Harel Weinstein, whose job titles tell a story of connectivity. He was the Lamport Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine when he joined TIRP and added more jobs at Weill Cornell Medical College: the Upson Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, chairman of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine. And Weinstein's institute office is in a Rockefeller University building, Smith Hall, which Weill Cornell helped renovate.

When Weinstein was "only" a Mount Sinai professor, he leveraged National Institutes of Health support to link that school to New York University and its Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. "But what was missing at Courant was a bioengineering component," Weinstein said, calling that field one of the attractions to TIRP, which encompasses an established program in bioengineering at Cornell's College of Engineering in Ithaca, which in turn has had a long and active relationship with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. That connection let Weinstein incorporate bioengineering into a new TIRP graduate program he heads, Computational Biology and Medicine. The graduate students see the latest bioengineering R&D in Ithaca and the clinical applications at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

All the program-building has turned Weinstein into something of a real-estate agent as he tries to find laboratory space with the infrastructure to do physiology research and computing, as well housing for scholars-in-residence and graduate students and their families who shuttle between New York and Ithaca. The student housing has been the easier task; while in New York they stay at the Helmsley Medical Tower, just a few steps from Weill Cornell's New York Presbyterian Hospital and a couple of blocks from the so-called Tri-Institutional Corner, at East 68th and York.

All the extra effort has been worth it, Weinstein believes. "The biggest surprise is the quality of students we're attracting. They're very astute, and they're excited to find a comprehensive program they can trust at a time when scientific fields are converging to develop a computer science-based understanding of biological problems."

Hironori Funabiki might have been one of those graduate students -- if TIRP had existed before 2000 -- but now he has a faculty position as an assistant professor in TIRP's Cancer and Developmental Biology program, a home base in Rockefeller University, and graduate students of his own to guide.

Funabiki's research -- into the cell-division proteins involved when duplicate sets of chromosomes, called sister chromatids, move along microtubule "threads" to opposite poles in the new cells -- is the kind of basic, fundamental study Rockefeller University is known for. Still, because his basic research might someday find application in controlling cancerous cell division, it will be handy to have a major cancer center (like Sloan-Kettering) nearby.

A TIRP faculty member since the spring of 2002, Funabiki first had to establish his laboratory before beginning the search for new chromosome-binding proteins, and he found the first candidate in April of this year. In the collaborative spirit of TIRP, he has already begun building informal connections to potential collaborators at Sloan-Kettering and Weill Cornell.

Institutional connectivity is important, Funabiki says, but so is practical convenience -- like location of a good library when he needs to look something up. "When I was at Harvard," said Funabiki, who was a postdoctoral fellow there, "the medical school library was a long bus ride [from Harvard's Cambridge campus to the School of Medicine in Boston]. Here, any of the [TIRP institutions'] libraries is a five-minute walk."

Tan

Derek S. Tan is working on a different kind of library. The TIRP assistant professor of chemistry and chemical genetics, who hangs his lab coat at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, is using an approach called diversity-oriented synthesis to generate libraries of small molecules that will be tested for biological activity. If the work goes as planned, some of the molecules could become valuable tools for studying basic biological processes, and some might be the first step on the long road to developing new therapeutic agents.

His synthetic molecules incorporate structural features of natural compounds, he said, because "we are trying to leverage the eons of evolutionary pressure that nature has exerted on the development of biologically active compounds." Working with synthetic molecules avoids many of the complications associated with testing natural compounds themselves.

Tan's lab is now working to synthesize several libraries of 500 to 5,000 small molecules apiece. Then the libraries will be tested, using high-throughput screens for biological activity, in collaboration with Tan's biologist colleagues in all three institutions. After the initial screenings, the search will narrow as "hits" from the first rounds are elaborated in secondary libraries for further screening.

Tan said he initially was attracted to Sloan-Kettering by the "large infrastructure of fantastic biology going on here," and he found the biological expertise at Cornell and Rockefeller to be an important scientific dividend. As an educator, Tan said his participation in the Tri-Institutional Training Program in Chemical Biology -- as well as in the Pharmacology Graduate Program, a longer-standing partnership between Sloan-Kettering and Weill Cornell -- has brought talented graduate students to his lab. At a time when dual or even triple fields of specialization are just a hyphen away, Tan is content to be "just a chemist." Trying to do high-level biology and chemistry at the same time is extremely difficult, he believes, "so I decided to focus on just one and to work with my biological colleagues to apply chemical tools to biology."

If he tried do it all himself, Tan reasons, he would miss out on many rewarding collaborations. And he might never get out of the library.