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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Institute for Systems Biology Receives $13 Million in Grants from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Amgen to support World-Class Medical Research and Technology
SEATTLE - Wednesday, October 19, 2005 - The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), an internationally renowned non-profit research institute dedicated to the study and application of systems biology, announced today that it has been awarded two grants worth $13 million. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded ISB $10 million in a challenge grant and Amgen granted ISB $3 million for endowment and operations.
"Lee has built an impressive team," Bill Gates said. "With this grant, we are supporting an innovative Northwest-based organization that offers unique potential to combine world-class medical research and technology and change the way we think about predicting and preventing diseases."
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation complimented ISB for having built a cross-disciplinary faculty and staff composed of biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians and physicists. All of these scientists are focused on developing new biologies, technologies and computational tools to enable systems approaches to disease.
"The gifts of the Gates Foundation and Amgen provide critical support for a new Institute that is attempting to change the practice of biology and medicine in the 21st century," said Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology president and co-founder. "The support of these world-class Foundations will validate our science and provide a milestone advance in the emergence of the Institute as a world leader in the new biology and medicine."
"Systems biology promises to open new doors for the discovery of drugs, and to permit new approaches to preventing disease," said Roger M. Perlmutter, executive vice president for research an development at Amgen, Inc., and chairman of the Institute for Systems Biology board. "Amgen, by awarding this grant to the ISB, recognizes Lee Hood's visionary role as a founding member of the Amgen Scientific Advisory Board 25 years ago, as well as the important work of the Institute in furthering the development of personalized, predictive and preventive medicine."
About the Institute for Systems Biology
The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is an internationally renowned non-profit research institute dedicated to the study and application of systems biology. ISB's goal is to unravel the mysteries of human biology and identify strategies for predicting and preventing diseases such as cancer, diabetes and AIDS. The driving force behind the innovative "systems" approach is the integration of biology, computation, and technology. This approach allows scientists to analyze all of the elements in a system rather than one gene or protein at a time. Located in Seattle, Washington, the Institute has grown to 11 faculty and more than 170 staff members; an annual budget of more than $25 million; and an extensive network of academic and industrial partners. For more information about the ISB visit: www.systemsbiology.org
About The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to promoting greater equity in the areas of global health, education, and public libraries. The foundation also works on regional projects in the Pacific Northwest. More information about the foundation is available at www.gatesfoundation.org.
Background on Institute for Systems Biology:
To understand how ISB works, one might employ a simple analogy. For instance, understanding how a radio works. The first thing to identify are all the component parts—the resistors, transistors, capacitors, etc. But knowing the parts would provide no fundamental insight into how the radio worked. To gain this insight, one must understand how the components parts are connected together in electrical circuits and how these circuits interact with one another to convert radio waves into sound. In a similar vein, the genome project has provided a parts list of all the human genes, but to understand how these genes work together in a human being, one must identify the biological circuits of life and understand how these circuits function together to encode all of our human traits.
The means for identifying these biological circuits and determining how they function together is a striking new approach to biology termed systems biology. It is just this approach that the ISB began to pioneer when it was created in 2000. This approach requires, not only developing new strategies for doing biology, but it also requires the development of new technologies for the measurement of biological information and the creation of new software for analyzing all of this biology data. ISB has been a world leader in pioneering the development of powerful new technologies and computational tools inspired by the needs of systems biology.
This systems approach can also be applied to medicine and disease. The system view of disease leads to powerful new diagnostic techniques for the early detection of disease and to entirely new approaches to the development of new drugs. The systems view of disease together with powerful new nanotechnology tools for measuring blood components and imaging tools and chemistries for visualizing the functioning of drugs in the human being lead inevitably to a completely new type of medicine (over the next two to 20 years) where ISB's current reactive approach to disease (wait until the patient gets sick to treat them) will be replaced by a predictive, preventive and personalized modes of medicine. The conceptual framework, necessary technologies and explorations of this new medicine are now being pioneered at the Institute.
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CONTACT:
Todd Langton
Associate Director of Communications and Public Relations
(206) 732-1333
Email
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