Blueprint North America, a Toronto, Canada-based nonprofit that builds and operates globally used proteomic databases, on May 2 laid off half of its 65 staff. That’s because a three-year C$29 ($23) million grant from Genome Canada, a public research funding organization, expired without new funds being secured.
According to Blueprint’s lead researcher and founder Christopher Hogue, remaining staff will be let go in July if no new sources are tapped before then. That would leave only Blueprint’s Asian offshoot, a 15-employee nonprofit in Singapore funded by that country’s government, to keep the databases running.
The Blueprint Initiative started in 1998 as part of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. It develops, hosts and maintains several proteomic databases, most importantly BIND, an open-source, open-access depository for biomolecular interaction data similar to GenBank. Supported by Canada and Sun Microsystems, it has grown exponentially drawing its data from, among others, research papers in 77 scientific journals.
Talks on a possible expansion of the Singapore branch as well as last-minute rescues by two Canadian provinces are ongoing. “[However] it has been very difficult to get people’s attention and describe to them what it means for research to have a database like BIND,” says Hogue, who adds he is “very open-minded” about moving to Singapore himself.