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Thursday, September 4, 2008
Broad Institute made permanent with $400M endowment boost
By Mass High Tech Staff
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The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, a Cambridge research center that focuses on the use of genomics in medicine, has received a $400 million endowment from founding benefactors Eli and Edythe Broad, bringing the couple’s total gift donations to $600 million. The total gift ensures the institute will be a “permanent biomedical research organization” rather than a 10-year “venture” experiment.
The endowment marks the largest financial donation for a university biomedical research in the world, according to institute officials. As a result, the institute is slated to transfer to a permanent non-profit organization, although it will continuing to be governed in part by both MIT and Harvard.
News of the endowment and future status of the Broad Institute is scheduled for announcement this morning at a press conference.
The Broad Institute was founded in 2003, following the establishment of the Human Genome Project, with a $100 million gift from Eli and Edythe Broad, Los Angeles philanthropists whose family owns AIG Sun America Inc. The $100 million was planned as a 10-year investment; they added another $100 million in 2005 though, and in 2007, the Stanley Medical Research Institute contributed another $100 million to create the psychiatric research center at the institute.
Highlighting the Broad Institute’s track record of genomic research is a $15 million effort to map the genome of a horse, completed in 2007, with the information deposited into a public database. Also in 2007, the institute published the first genome sequence of a marsupial.
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