Core Research Facilities

AMDeC has developed several shared core research facilities for advancing genomics research.  These cores include InTraGen, the Bioinformatics Core Facility and the Microarray Resource Center.  The goal at the outset of AMDeC’s core research facilities program was to increase efficiencies across our affiliated institutions.  Rather than having each institution individually invest in costly technologies, our research cores allow them to maximize efficiency by accessing these shared resources. 

The increased need for data standardization and sharing has led AMDeC to revamp the original goals of the core research facilities program.  Our research cores have become central repositories for standard microarray data (including the single largest collection of microarrays in the country), new bioinformatics software and tools and general platforms for cross-institutional collaboration.

InTraGen   

BioInformatics Core

Microarray Resource Center

Shared Use Mouse Facility

InTraGen

To translate scientific results into clinical advances, medical research must harness the combined power of many clinical and research institutions. AMDeC’s Integrated Translational Genomics (InTraGen) program will build on a decade of work by our consortium to assemble a pre-competitive infrastructure that encourages joint research and an information superhighway for the exchange of biomedical information.  

InTraGen will:

• Improve medical diagnostics and therapeutics by providing computational and analytical tools to merge and analyze a variety of personal data, including gene expression, protein, and clinical information.
• Tap the combined resources of many New York State institutions and their diverse populations by allowing rapid recruitment of many subjects with specific attributes into a clinical trial.
• Accelerate genetically based clinical trials and reduce their cost by genotyping in advance a diverse group of nearly 20,000 people, both to supply matched controls and to assess whether proposed studies are likely to be definitive.
• Attract talent and funding to New York State, by providing a pre-competitive infrastructure that lets researchers and biotechnology partners harness the state's rich resources to translate basic science into medical advances.
• Generate data to inspire new products and licensing opportunities for New York State institutions and to provide a testing ground for targeted approaches to disease.

For more information about AMDeC’s InTraGen program, please click here.

Researchers: To apply for access to the InTraGen database, please click here.

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BioInformatics Core

Housed at Columbia University’s Genome Center and working in collaboration with the State University at Buffalo’s Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, this core facilitates the integration of bioinformatics and computational biology into biomedical research at AMDeC-affiliated institutions. It also promotes the development of new analytical tools, databases, and methods to study the genetic basis of health and disease. The core’s services include access to key genomic databases and libraries of software; training, outreach; and research development. Major bioinformatics projects underway are comparing genomic DNA sequences from the core’s libraries with the genomes of other model organisms to catalogue classes of genes that are turned on or off at various stages of development in both their normal and disease states. These comparisons may shed light on DNA sequences that inhibit or cause specific diseases.

For more information, please click here.

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Microarray Resource Center

Led by the University of Rochester’s Center for Functional Genomics, this core assists scientists interested in what cells and tissues, and under what circumstances, particular genes are expressed and how such gene expression relates to specific disease processes. By applying state-of-the-art microarray technology, the Microarray Resource Center (MRC) produces and analyzes gene-profiling data, produces customized microarray technologies that can be accessed by AMDeC-affiliated investigators, and assists member institutions in developing the capacity to produce their own microarrays. Users of our Microarray Resource Center benefit from an extensive selection of arrays, low processing costs, quick turn-around times, and archiving of data and biological materials, all of which allow for faster and better science at the institutional level.

Researchers: To learn more about the MRC, please click here.

Shared Use Mouse Facility

Laboratory mice represent an experimental key to understanding human genetics and biology.  Improved and efficient access to mice that are reliably disease-free is therefore of great value to the biomedical research community. AMDeC launched an effort to develop a shared use mouse breeding facility to create significant savings and free up scarce resources for other research priorities at participating members institutions. 

Along with reducing the overall cost of housing and breeding research mice for participating member institutions (including Mount Sinai Medical Center, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, New York University Medical Center and The Rockefeller University), the Shared Use Mouse Facility (Mouse House) will further our mission by spurring economic development through the advancement of a new biotech center in New York State and by helping to attract the best and brightest genomics researchers to New York.

Since securing $10 million in state funds for the capital development of the Mouse House in fall 2006, AMDeC has been working to identify a commercial partner to breed and raise mice. Once identified through an RFP process, our partner will participate in the conceptual design phase.

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