Here to stay: The institute looks forward Credit: Anton Grassl

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard—a renowned genomics center based in Cambridge, Massachusetts—ended the first week in September with a clearer picture of its future and nearly half a billion dollars richer than it was at the start.

The windfall week began with an announcement on 2 September that the institute would receive $86 million from the US National Institutes of Health for its molecular screening program, aimed at developing chemical probes for disease. But this news was overshadowed just two days later when Los Angeles philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad announced a new $400 million donation to the institute.

The Broads had already contributed $200 million, but this initial donation stipulated that the funds had to be spent within ten years and could not be parlayed into a lasting endowment. Eli Broad, who calls himself a venture philanthropist, had initially viewed the institute as an experiment.

“We've been wondering for some time, 'what's going to happen at the end of that ten-year period?'” says Eric Lander, the institute's founding director. “Will the experiment be over?”

The new donation will be funneled into a lasting endowment, enabling the institute to become an independent nonprofit. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will continue to serve on its governing board, and collaborations will not be affected, Lander says.

The Broad Institute was launched in 2004 as an unusual attempt to unite several local academic powerhouses—MIT, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Harvard University, all based in Cambridge—with the clinical expertise of Harvard's affiliated hospitals. In addition to more traditional scientific programs in topics ranging from infectious diseases to population genetics, the institute also has several research teams that focus on developing technological platforms, such as genome sequencing.

Over the past four years, the institute has swelled to include over 1,200 scientists and professional staff. Employees of the institute—sometimes called 'Broadies'—often champion its collaborative atmosphere.

When cancer geneticist Tom Hudson was recently tasked with forming the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, which he now leads as president, he decided to adopt the Broad Institute's collaborative model. Bringing clinicians and researchers from different institutions together can be a challenge, he says, but the collaborative model also attracts funders interested in supporting translational research. “I'm being asked every week to go and give a talk somewhere,” Hudson says, referring to his role in forming the Ontario institute. “There are a lot of groups looking at the Broad model.”