Blueprint initiative receives $29 million in funding

A unique project to make biomolecular knowledge available to all researchers through an open source database has received a total of $29 million in funding from the federal and Ontario governments and three private sector partners.

The Blueprint Initiative research program — led by Dr Christopher Hogue of the Mount Sinai Hospital’s Samuel Lun-enfeld Research Institute (SRLI) — will enter 80,000 molecular interaction records into the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND).

Backing the project are Genome Canada, Ontario R&D Challenge Fund (ORDCF), Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Sun Microsystems, MDS Proteomics (MDSP) and Foundry Networks. The money will be used to further BIND’s software development, database curation, computer hardware and networking and is contingent on meeting set milestones, deliverables and quality for software releases and database content.

Originally known as Blueprint Worldwide Inc, the project was launched in May/01 by MDSP and IBM in conjunction with SRLI. The project was cut loose by MDSP when it retrenched to focus on core business activities. Key to reactivating the project and moving it beyond the prototype stage was the participation of Sun Microsystems, which became the necessary private sector partner that allowed for participation by the ORDCF.

With the new funding in place, BIND is poised to become the world’s most comprehensive repository of data and research on molecular interaction for use by researchers in 16 different fields. The Ontario government sees the project as a lynchpin in its bid to make the province a global centre for proteomic database management and research. Blueprint will also be an early tenant in the MaRS Discovery District project, which officially launched last month (R$, May 22/03).

The funding will allow Blueprint’s staffing levels to increase from the current 59 to 77 by 2005, including 12 database curators and 28 software developers. Hogue will be supported SRLI’s Dr Tony Pawson, Dr Francis Ouellette of the Univ of British Columbia’s Bioinformatics Centre and Dr Boris Steipe, chair of the Blueprint scientific advisory group.

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