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AMDeC President Maria K. Mitchell, Ph.D., Addresses 5th Annual Stem Cell Summit
February 16, 2010Dr. Maria K. Mitchell, Ph.D., kicked-off the 5th Annual Stem Cell Summit on February 16 in New York City and offered a New York perspective on stem cell research and development.
The annual Stem Cell Summit brings the leading industry, investment, and research innovators of the rapidly expanding and highly competitive stem cell field together for one day. The 2010 Summit focused on the latest challenges in commercializing stem cell products and featured 35 corporate presenters. For more information, please visit: www.stemcellsummit.com.
Below is the address delivered by Dr. Mitchell:
GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO NEW YORK CITY!
Thank you Robin for inviting me to bring greetings to such an august group this snowy February morning! Isn’t New York great in the winter?
On behalf of AMDeC, the Academy for Medical Development and Collaboration, I’d like to officially welcome you to New York City, the greatest city in the world. As someone who worked for two New York City Mayors, I feel like I can bring that official greeting!
Now, in case you thought you misheard the name of the organization I run…
Did she just say collaboration? – in New York City?...
It’s true. AMDeC has been successfully spearheading scientific collaborations across our rich academic community for 12 years!
You might not have heard our name, but I bet everyone in this room is familiar with at least one very positive outcome of our work---a $600 million investment by the State of New York in stem cell research.
On March 20th, 2003 AMDeC brought Christopher Reeve to Albany to witness the unanimous passage of legislation supporting stem cell research by the New York State assembly. As well as the introduction of the bill in the senate. This was before California’s big stem cell legislation, and there was no money at the time.
But AMDeC at the forefront knew we needed strong State support after the Bush administration drastically restricted federal funding for stem cell research.
As a direct result of that momentous day in Albany, now 7 years ago, a coalition was built around AMDeC to capitalize on our successful effort, and the $600 million bill was signed!
And that is just one of the many success stories of AMDeC’’s collaborative efforts.
In 1999, when everyone thought it couldn’t be done, AMDeC pioneered the successful recruitment of over 20 thousand ethnically diverse New Yorkers into a longitudinal study to look at the genetic causes of cancer and other major diseases… and that was prior to the mapping of the genome!
We still house the 18,000 plus DNA samples from this diverse cohort at Rutgers University and have the medical and family history at Columbia University. Nearly 40 scientific journal articles have been written as a result of using the cohort as controls in studying cancer, diabetes, obesity and rheumatoid arthritis – to name a few.
We are also in the third year of a 5 year study to look at the genetic predisposition of type 2 diabetes in ethnically diverse adolescents and have nearly 1,000 New York City middle school kids enrolled in the study. The study is also supplying diet and exercise intervention in 5 New York City public schools. Those are a few of our team science efforts.
On a different front, we are about to begin – after six years of work – a shared-use mouse breeding facility which will allow our member institutions to off-load their breeding mice to a much more cost-effective space. We have secured $8.5 million in New York State funding and are just waiting to hear on a $4.5 million Federal grant to begin.
We have begun working with a number of companies through our vendorpartnership program – achieving hundreds of thousand of dollars of savings for our members as well as placing major instrumentation for free. Agilent, through AMDeC, just placed a half million dollar mass spectrometer instrument at MountSinai, and today we are about to announce the result of another RFP review and will place a several hundred thousand dollar RainDance Technologies’ instrument at another one of our member institutions, free of charge.
Most of you are likely more familiar with the fact that New York City is the city with the 2nd largest NIH funding…or that we are home to 122 Nobel laureates, and employ over 110,000 people in the biosciences.
You may not know that the city has recently opened the first phase of a state of the art Research park: East River Science Park, which is expected to expand to 1.1 million square feet.
In addition, the Mayor recently signed a $3 million tax credit to encourage small biotech companies to bring jobs and new technology to New York.
There is so much more to tell you about, but I know you want to get started with your day.
I thank you for your time and I thank you for coming to New York. Have a wonderful stay and a great conference!