Boston

The high-tech manufacturers Corning have entered into a $10 million research partnership with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Corning will give the Whitehead $2.5 million for each of the next four years for the development of what the company calls “the next generation of DNA microarrays and other tools of the post-genome world”.

The partnership aims to produce DNA chips that can analyse 10,000 human genes at a time and to develop protein arrays to facilitate the simultaneous study of thousands of proteins.

“There is a critical need for researchers in academia and industry to collaborate in the battle against human disease in order to develop technologies with the potential to revolutionize medical science,” says Richard Young, a biologist at the Whitehead and MIT who will direct the project. “We intend to use technologies developed through the joint initiative with Corning to lay a foundation for better drugs and vaccines.”