Pataki Announces State, Private Commitments of More than $200 Million for Bioinformatics Center

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- With the announcement Thursday by Gov. George E. Pataki of $50 million in state funding and more than $150 million in private-sector funding, the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics -- a collaborative effort involving New York State, industry partners and academic institutions -- has taken a major step toward becoming a reality.

The Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics will merge high-end technology, including supercomputing and visualization, with expertise in genomics, proteomics, and bioimaging to foster advances in science and health care. An emerging discipline, bioinformatics uses the power of supercomputers to interpret data in the biological sciences at the molecular level.

First proposed in January by Pataki, the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics is an integral part of Pataki's plan to develop centers of excellence across the state to harness the strengths of universities and the private sector to create strategically targeted high-technology centers of innovation all aimed at spurring economic development and creating jobs.

Since that initial announcement, UB administrators and faculty, along with administrators and researchers from the center's other two academic partners -- Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute -- have worked together with representatives of local companies and local, regional and state officials to attract funding from major national corporations.

On Thursday, Pataki said that effort is bearing fruit and that the center "will go forward."

In addition to an "initial installment" of $50 million from New York State, he announced the following commitments in software, hardware, venture capital, cash and equipment to date from the industry partners:

* Veridian will contribute $62.5 million

* Compaq has pledged $42.6 million

* Informax will provide $20.8 million

* A group of Western New York businesses is investing $15 million

* Stryker Communications is providing $7.2 million to create a communications network for the center

* Dell Computer Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. together are providing more than $1 million

Other partners include Invitrogen Corp., Q-Chem, SGI, Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, AT&T, Wyeth Lederle, Human Genome Sciences, Inc. and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The level of the commitment of New York State and the industry and academic partners, Pataki said, will assure the center will be "the state-of-the-art facility, not just in the United States, but in the world."

Pataki predicted that the center "will transform Western New York into a 21st-century economy."

He said it will create "thousands of jobs, thousands of high-paying, high-tech, 21st-century jobs for the people of Buffalo, for the people of Western New York, for the people of New York State.

"We want this to be the best in America, the best in the world," Pataki added. "With the talent we have here, there is no reason it can't be with our continued partnership making it happen."

Pataki said the center will be headquartered in a 150,000-square-foot facility to be built near Buffalo's medical corridor. That facility, he added, "is going to be the...glue that brings the private sector, the public sector and the not-for-profit research sectors together in a way that will make Western New York the center for this multi, multi hundred-billion-dollar industry in the 21st century."

The facility, he added, will house drug-design and research laboratories, high-performance computational facilities, 3-D visualization capabilities, product commercialization space and workforce training facilities.

Speaking on behalf of the center's corporate partners was Bill Blake, worldwide vice president for high performance technical computing with Compaq.

Blake said the center "will be a very successful example of a private-public partnership moving ahead in science and using that science to generate a strong industrial base in this region."

Blake said Compaq has been involved with centers of excellence in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Taiwan. Its relationship with the Buffalo center, he added, will be "the most serious and is the highest level of commitment we're going to have."

Referring to the head of the company that succeeded in sequencing the human genome, former UB faculty member Craig Venter, and his company, Celera Genomics, Blake noted that the Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics will take the products of that revolutionary research and, in turn, create future scientific revolutions.

"This center will spawn the next generation of Dr. Venters and the next generation of Celera Genomics here in the Buffalo area," he said.

William R. Greiner, president of the University at Buffalo, which is taking the lead among the center's academic partners, thanked Pataki for his vision and leadership and his "continuing commitment to Buffalo Niagara. It is much appreciated in this region and we will work to make you proud."

The Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics is a natural progression of the pioneering work that the center's major research partners -- UB, Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute -- have been doing for years in the areas of high-performance computing and visualization, structural biology, genomics, proteomics, pharmaceutical science and generation of custom gene "chips" through the generation of DNA microarrays.