Founded to investigate the complex living machinery of cells, the Seattle-based institute and its inaugural project, the Allen Cell Observatory, will work to accelerate disease research around the world and boost understanding of fundamental yet elusive questions in cell science such as how does information encoded in our genes become three-dimensional living cells, and what goes wrong in disease.
Rick Horwitz, who served for ten years as director of the NIH-funded Cell Migration Consortium and spent the past fifteen years in the department of cell biology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where his lab investigated the mechanisms of cell migration and dendritic spine morphogenesis, has been named to lead the institute.
"Cells are the fundamental units of life, with every disease we know of affecting particular types of cells," said Allen. "Scientists have learned a great deal about many of the fifty trillion cells in our bodies over the last decades, but creating a comprehensive, predictive model of the cell will require a different approach. We conceived of the Allen Institute for Cell Science as a catalyzing force to integrate technologies and approaches at a large scale in order to provide an exceptional resource for the entire scientific community. It is our hope that this effort will bring forward the treatment of different diseases."