Microsoft billionaire takes on cell biology

B illionaire businessman and philanthropist Paul Allen plans to pump US$100 million into investigating the most basic unit of life — the cell. The Allen Institute for Cell Science, which was launched on 8 December, will be modelled on the Microsoft co-founder's Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, which since 2003 has spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating a series of 'brain atlases' that have become go-to portals for neuroscientists interested in where particular genes are active or how distant neurons communicate. As its first project, the new Allen institute will develop an analogous 'cell observatory' that will display how a cell's working parts, such as ribosomes, microtubules and mito-chondria, interact and operate over time, says executive director Rick Horwitz. He has shut-tered his cell-biology laboratory at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to lead the institute in Seattle, Washington. The 70 or so scientific staff who will join the institute will work together on the overall goals of the observatory — to build a global view of the myriad activities inside cells — rather than on their own interests. " It's going to be much more like the Manhattan Project, " Horwitz says. Mapping every little detail of every kind of cell is a tall order, even with the backing of the world's 27th richest person. " Our problem is that this thing could blow up on us. It could be very, very big, " Horwitz says. " We're going to make judicious decisions to try to contain it. " Some of those choices have already been made, after meetings this year with leading cell biologists. The institute will study human induced pluripotent stem cells (cells coaxed into an embryonic stem-cell-like state) as they differentiate in the lab into two cell types: heart-muscle cells called cardiomyocytes; and the epithelial cells that line body cavities. These tissues were chosen as much for their relevance to disease — cardio myocytes malfunction in heart disease and most cancers arise in epithelial tissues — as for the ease with which they can be reproducibly generated and grown in the lab. The institute's plan is to engineer many different cell lines and determine how different cellular components respond to stimuli such as infection or exposure to a drug. These data will then guide the construction of computer models aimed at predicting how cells operate under various conditions, and all the information …