Hell's Kitchen Stem Cell Lab Gets $6M Grant From City

HELL'S KITCHEN, NY — A disease research institute based in Hell's Kitchen received a multimillion-dollar grant from the city last week to expand its labs, officials announced.

The New York Stem Cell Foundation will use the $6.5 million grant to enlarge its West 54th Street institute, enabling more research into drugs and treatments and new collaborations with universities and other companies, the institute said.

Diseases researched by NYSCF include Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis.

The funding was part of a combined $38 million in grants announced Thursday by Mayor Bill de Blasio. They are part of LifeSciNYC, a $500 million initiative launched by the de Blasio administration in 2016 to grow the city's life-sciences industry over the next 10 years.

New equipment purchased through the grant will increase the center's ability to produce new cells for research and expand its capacity to test new drugs, among other uses.

"We must accelerate both the pace and success rate of developing new and better treatments for patients, and to do so it is essential for research scientists and companies to perform end-to-end drug screening on the human cells that are actually affected by the diseases we are trying to cure," Susan L. Solomon, NYSCF's founder and CEO, said in a statement.

De Blasio described the life-science grants as part of a citywide push to make New York the "public health capital of the world."

The New York Stem Cell Foundation was founded in 2005 and opened its 54th Street headquarters in 2017.