Dean Charney Lures PacBio’s Schadt to Mount Sinai
By Kevin Davies
May 16, 2011 | Dennis Charney, Dean of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSSM), provided additional details on the recruitment of Pacific Biosciences CSO Eric Schadt to head MSSM’s new Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology and the Department of Genetics.
The new institute “is an expansion of an existing institute, the Institute of Genomics, which we formed a couple of years ago,” he said. Charney had been recruiting a new leader for the institute to succeed medical geneticist Robert Desnick, who is stepping down as director and as the Chair of the MSSM Department of Genetics. Schadt is taking on both positions. (See “PacBio CSO Eric Schadt to Lead ‘Multiscale Institute’ at Mount Sinai.”)
Charney says he expects to invest more than $100 million in the new institute over the next 5-6 years, as part of a $1-billion capital campaign for MSSM. “We’ve raised $750 million and it’s ahead of schedule,” said Charney. “The initial funding of the institute comes from philanthropy.”
The partnership with PacBio began with Charney recruiting Schadt. “I was recruiting for a new head of the department of the institute, and I heard about Eric, of course, so I went after him big time! I was trying to get him to come to Mount Sinai.” It quickly became clear that “a partnership with PacBio would be good for Mt Sinai, apparently good for PacBio, and was something that Eric really endorsed.”
It was little secret that PacBio had been considering a clinical partnership with the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). “A lot of spadework had been done about what that partnership could be like,” said Charney. “To me, it seemed like a win-win. We get access to PacBio technology, which we’re all very excited about. And they get, in a sense, access to the great research we’re doing here, the patient populations that could be like a testing site.”
“Multiscale Biology” is a Schadt term. The way Charney understands the term, “we’re talking about systems genetics, integrative genetics, systems biology, which we’re very strong in at Mount Sinai. The idea of one gene/one disease or looking at genes in isolation from pathways doesn’t make sense. That’s totally in line with the way we’re doing things.”
As for possible reservations in some quarters regarding such an intimate relationship with one specific next-generation sequencing vendor, Charney admits, “that’s possible.”
“It’s not an exclusive relationship with PacBio,” he says. “We have Illumina machines and so forth. You can’t stick with one technology platform. So we’re going to be active in all of those platforms. However, I can see that Illumina might say, ‘It’s fine if you buy our commercial machines, but we’re not going to share our latest next-gen machine.’ That may be a consequence of this, but we’re certainly going to be buying other commercial machines.”