UMass Medical team wins $2.8M for cryo microscope

Photo | UMass Medical School UMass Medical School Cryo-EM Core facility

Write a Comment

By Katherine Hamilton

The Cryo-EM Core facility at UMass Medical School received $2.8 million from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center on Thursday to purchase a cryo-electron microscope to support the team’s structural biology research.

Researchers Roger Davis, Celia Schiffer, and Andrei Korostelev, were all co-applicants on the MLSC grant.

Davis explained the new microscope will speed workflow in the facility considerably, and support the team’s structure-based drug design research.

“Visualization of the molecular basis of biology and disease will permit us to battle deadly diseases, such as COVID-19,” said Davis, in a press release.

Since its establishment in 2015 with funding from MLSC and the Maryland nonprofit Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Cryo-EM Core facility has contributed research to 30 biotech and pharma companies and 100 academic laboratories. It is already home to two high-end transmission electron microscopes, the Titan Krios and the Talos-Arctica, which can magnify objects up to two million times their size.

MLSC is an economic development investment agency which has invested $700 million in life science research in Massachusetts since it was founded in 2007.