Albany Medical College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have agreed to share research facilities and equipment.
Dr. Gabrielle Fredman, professor and vice chair in the Department of Molecular Cellular Physiology at Albany Medical College, studies how the human body deals with inflammation.
That work involves sending samples to labs across the Northeast. At least, it used to. A new partnership formalized last month with RPI in Troy is about to significantly streamline Fredman’s research.
“I would have to ship it out, maybe to Boston or to someplace at a different university that is not very accessible, you know, and then I'm just shipping off a sample and hoping for the best. Here, because it's just down the street, you know, realistically, it's just a car drive, a very short car drive. We can have a lot more control about quality and how to do the analysis, so it's not necessarily faster, but it's just a much better way to do the science,” Fredman said.
That kind of efficiency is central to the partnership between the two institutions, which grants AMC and RPI reciprocal access to each other’s core facilities. The agreement, initially set for five years with the possibility of extending, enables faculty members to share specialized resources, technologies and expertise.
Created, in part, to help keep costs down, the deal could also help foster a collaborative energy that reimagines the way research is conducted across the Capital Region.
Dean of Albany Medical College Alan Boulos said "Both institutions have been successful in getting core equipment that is expensive and highly technical and extremely rare, and requires a fair bit of facility by the people who use it. We have developed a memorandum of understanding that would allow investigators from either site to work at the other's core lab, and that collaboration, I think, makes a lot of logical sense."
Researches like Fredman say the coordination could lead to new breakthroughs.
“A mission of my lab is really promoting something we call translational research, which is understanding very granular biochemistry in cells and how that can relate to humans. And that biochemistry arm of my program is really about identifying molecules that can potentially be new drugs. Synergizing with RPI cores like their NMR and other sort of analytical chemistry is exactly where I could see a future happening, where we could potentially use some of that high tech synergize with our high tech and maybe, hopefully one day make new drugs for humans,” said Fredman.
Professor Juergen Haan, director of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at RPI, says collaborating reduces costs and avoids the need for each facility to house expensive equipment. "There's actually 11 core facilities from RPI side that people at AMC will get access to, and there's four core facilities at AMC sites that researchers at RPI will now be able to access," said Haan, who added there's also a bigger goal on the horizon.
"This agreement with Albany met that we signed. That's not the only agreement. Yeah, for us, it's the most important one so far. But we actually have a similar agreement in place with Albany College of Pharmacy that we signed earlier this spring, and we are working with other regional partners here to also get similar agreements with them in place. Yeah, I mean, nothing to announce that yet, because it hasn't been signed yet. But the goal for us is really to build an ecosystem for research in the Capital Region, where our research guys get access to all the available equipment, and likewise, we let others use ours if they need it," Haan said.
