The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), an internationally renowned non-profit research institute dedicated to the study and application of systems biology, announced today that it has been awarded two grants worth $13 million. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded ISB $10 million in a challenge grant and Amgen granted ISB $3 million for endowment and operations. "Lee has built an impressive team," Bill Gates said. "With this grant, we are supporting an innovative Northwest-based organization that offers unique potential to combine world-class medical research and technology and change the way we think about predicting and preventing diseases." The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation complimented ISB for having built a cross-disciplinary faculty and staff composed of biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians and physicists. All of these scientists are focused on developing new biologies, technologies and computational tools to enable systems approaches to disease. "The gifts of the Gates Foundation and Amgen provide critical support for a new Institute that is attempting to change the practice of biology and medicine in the 21st century," said Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology president and co-founder. "The support of these world-class Foundations will validate our science and provide a milestone advance in the emergence of the Institute as a world leader in the new biology and medicine." "Systems biology promises to open new doors for the discovery of drugs, and to permit new approaches to preventing disease," said Roger M. Perlmutter, executive vice president for research an development at Amgen, Inc., and chairman of the Institute for Systems Biology board." Amgen, by awarding this grant to the ISB, recognizes Lee Hood's visionary role as a founding member of the Amgen Scientific Advisory Board 25 years ago, as well as the important work of the Institute in furthering the development of personalized, predictive and preventive medicine."