Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has won a $750,000 grant from TD Bank to support its new cancer research facility.
The award is part of the TD Ready Challenge, an initiative to provide financial support to organizations that have developed solutions to improve detection and intervention of diseases.
The money will go towards the lab’s new Woodbury-based organoid facility.
Cat Donaldson, chief development officer at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, says organoids are a breakthrough technology that can help scientists study cancer's development and behavior in a patient.
“We’re partnering with clinical institutions really all around the world, taking patient samples from their cancer biopsies, growing patient-specific organoids and then doing drug screening on these organoids so we can inform the treating physician what would be the best course of action to treat that patient.”
She says the grant money will be used to research cancer within underrepresented minority populations, “specifically partnering with clinical institutions that are in urban areas, that serve a very diverse patient population so that we can get these patients sampled for our research side but also perform this drug screening for underrepresented minority patients who have cancer and get them access to these really state of the art clinical technologies.”
The lab is set to open later this month.