The New York Genome Center and Weill Cornell Medicine
EIPM Member Brian Robinson, M.D. speaking at the NYGC
Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) is one of the 12 founding institutional members of the New York Genome Center (NYGC), an independent, nonprofit academic research institution focused on furthering genomic research that leads to scientific advances and new insights and therapies for patients with neurodegenerative disease, neuropsychiatric disease, and cancer. The Center serves as a nexus for collaboration in genomic research for the New York community and beyond, building on the combined strengths of faculty, member institutions, scientific working groups, affiliate members, and industry partners.
WCM’s Harold Varmus, M.D., is a Senior Associate Core Member at NYGC and co-leads the Genome Center Cancer Group (GCCG) with Charles Sawyers, M.D., Chair, Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Chair, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Affiliate Member, NYGC. The GCCG recently launched Polyethnic-1000, a project to study cancer in ethnically diverse, underserved patient populations, and is spearheading a multi-institutional Very Rare Cancer Consortium, with the latter initiative led by the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine’s Director Olivier Elemento, Ph.D., who is also an Affiliate Member of the NYGC.
WCM professionals play a significant role in the NYGC leadership, including participation by Dean Augustine M.K. Choi, M.D., as a Member of the NYGC Board of Director’s; Dan Landau, M.D., Ph.D., and EIPM Member Marcin Imielinski, M.D., Ph.D., are Core Faculty Members and Senior Scientists; and several others participate as Affiliate Members.
Research Partnerships
Researchers from the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine and NYGC have benefited from a long relationship, partnering on a variety of projects. One of the largest to date is the Weill Cornell Medicine-New York Genome Center for Functional and Clinical Interpretation of Tumor Profiles.
In late 2016, investigators involved in the WCM-NYGC Weill Cornell Medicine-New York Genome Center (WCM-NYGC) for Functional and Clinical Interpretation of Tumor Profiles collaboration received just shy of $490,000 from the National Cancer Institute to help further data analysis for the Cancer Genome Atlas project.
Under the grant, the WCM-NYGC collaborators will look to handle coding mutations in clinical contexts including relevance to immunotherapies. They’ll also explore the role of driver non-coding mutations in transcriptional regulation, as well as the driving role of structural variations as one of 11 specialized genomic data centers that will be responsible for analyzing genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, and other kinds of data for the next phase of the Cancer Genome Atlas.
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