New York is home to several organizations that are uniting the city’s disparate academic institutions in pursuit of common goals. This month will mark the opening of the New York Genome Center, an effort among 11 colleges to collaborate on genomics research. In November, the New York eHealth Collaborative held its first conference, which was designed to bring together top players in the field of health IT. And just yesterday, the Academy for Medical Development and Collaboration (AMDeC) rolled out a set of enhancements to its year-old online registry—the only resource in the region that provides real-time access to technology and resources for biomedical researchers around the city who want to work together.
Maria Mitchell is the president of AMDeC, a 14-year-old consortium of nearly 20 medical research institutions, including Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Weill Cornell Medical College. The group’s online registry is called FIRST (for Facilities Instrumentation Resources Technologies), and, says Mitchell, it’s one of the biggest undertakings AMDeC has ever tackled.
Mitchell sat down recently with Xconomy to chat about the state of academic research in NYC, and how her group is fostering collaboration among far-flung and often competitive institutions.
Xconomy: How did AMDeC’s mission evolve over the years?
Maria Mitchell: One of the original goals of AMDeC was to create a venture capital fund that would help commercialize technologies from the institutions. But every investor said, “We have no interest in investing in a bunch of institutions that have no
