Event set to celebrate opening of VANTAGE shared resource
VANTAGE, Vanderbilt University’s new collaborative shared resource, is now open for business and ready to support innovative research in genomics and personalized medicine.
The facility will host an open house and reception for the Vanderbilt community from 3 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, June 5, in room S0100 in the basement of Medical Center North, near the intersection of the S and B corridors.
VANTAGE, which stands for VANderbilt Technologies for Advanced Genomics, is the new home for the Flow Cytometry Core, Genome Sciences Resource, DNA Resources Core and BioVU, Vanderbilt’s massive DNA database.
The co-location and expansion of the core facilities was made possible by a two-year, $8.6 million “stimulus” grant (1G20RR030956) awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
In addition to renovating more than 12,000 square feet of laboratory space, the project enabled the acquisition of cutting-edge equipment, including an Illumina MiSeq DNA sequencing system, Tecan robotic liquid handlers and the Amnis Flowsight flow cytometer to support development of new technical services offered by each core.
“The project team of architects, engineers, contractors and managers that designed and built this new laboratory space has done an outstanding job,” said Susan Wente, Ph.D., associate vice chancellor for Research and the grant's principal investigator.
“The VANTAGE cores now have a state-of-the-art environment for facilitating multi-disciplinary collaborations and accelerated discovery in clinical and basic science across the institution,” she said.