Harvard Given $40 Million

The National Cancer Institute will award Harvard $40 million over the next five years to create a new biochemistry lab that will make it easier for researchers to identify the proteins involved in disease, the University announced yesterday.

The selection of Harvard over other universities competing for the federal money comes after University President Lawrence H. Summers’ calls for the Boston area to become a national center of biomedical research.

In identifying and cataloguing huge numbers of chemicals in the hope of finding more effective drugs, the Molecular Target Laboratory (MTL) will expand on the work of Harvard’s smaller Institute of Chemical and Cellular Biology (ICCB).

Small organic molecules such as genes and proteins have been historically difficult to pinpoint—a difficulty that researchers said they hope the large scale of MTL’s operation can overcome.

Walter Professor of Cell Biology Marc W. Kirschner, who is head of the cell biology department at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and is active in ICCB, said the lab will be a “collaboration” between the chemistry department and HMS.

Kirschner said the new lab will not only allow researchers to work with many compounds simultaneously but will also create a huge public database of all its findings for use in labs all around the world, something that is unusual in biomedical research.

“Pharmaceutical companies study one small molecule at a time, but often don’t share their information with the public,” Kirschner said.

Researchers from across the globe will be able to access the vast biochemical library and get information on every aspect of cell biology. Information on everything from obesity genes to cancer proteins will be available for scientists to use in their own experiments.

Stuart L. Schreiber, who is Loeb professor of chemistry and chemical biology, will direct the lab.

“The defining feature of the MTL will be the advent of a systematic approach to chemical genetics,” Schreiber said yesterday in a press release.

According to a statement released by Harvard yesterday, the lab will conduct experiments on a scale previously available only to wealthy private pharmaceutical companies.

Kirschner said he looks forward to the MTL being able to do research more efficiently than individual scientists are currently able to—by working on a large number of molecules simultaneously.

“Grad students and post-docs can study some compounds,” Kirschner said, “but they can’t spend the time to do huge numbers of experiments.”