Unrestricted Giving
Unrestricted gifts help maintain the extraordinary depth of our research endeavors. Just as important, they give the Institute the ability to respond quickly to emerging opportunities.

ISB Endowment
Our aim is to build an endowment through the cultivation of private gifts, both outright and planned (i.e., through estates, bequests and trusts); and second, through The President's Discovery Fund, the earnings from which will provide essential unrestricted monies for research and development in perpetuity.

Support Current and Recruit New Faculty
Each faculty appointment requires funds to equip a laboratory and establish and sustain a research team and thus represents a major, long-term financial commitment on the part of the Institute. The ultimate goal is to increase the faculty to approximately 20 to 25 members. This will provide the Institute with the breadth of skills and interests required to pursue systems problems in a broad manner while maintaining the cohesion and interactions essential to the systems biology culture.

Improving K-12 Science Education
A crisis threatens science education in America today. Studies show that by high school, U.S. students have fallen behind their peers in other industrialized nations in science. A transformation must occur in science education for students at all levels, starting with those who will shape our country's future: K-12 students.

The Institute for Systems Biology—through its Center for Inquiry Science—is pioneering systemic K-12 science education reform in Seattle and surrounding areas. We seek funding to support the three components of our K-12 science strategy: teaching children inquiry-based thinking; training teachers to teach inquiry-based science; and to promote systemic reform—encompassing entire school districts—so that appropriate science education is available to all children, regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.

Your support of our Center for Inquiry Science would build on our many successes. ISB's program is taking crucial steps in strengthening the Puget Sound region's K-12 science education and has become a model for the state and the nation. To date, more than 1,500 teachers and 40,000 students have participated in these programs.

Medicine in the Developing World
Current procedures to assess health status, diagnose disease, select appropriate therapies, and build vaccines in the developing world are hampered by the inability to make accurate measurements. Today, expensive and complex machines and procedures are required to perform these tasks. In addition, the instruments and procedures require highly skilled operators.

We seek support to develop a variety of diagnostic tools employing nanotechnology and microfluidics technologies. These will be extremely affordable, even in developing economies, and can provide a multi-parameter blood analysis as a window into health and disease. These tools, combined with ISB's expertise in immunology and infectious diseases, will enable the Institute to make significant contributions to medicine in the developing world. ISB director Alan Aderem has established a significant collaboration with medical colleagues in South Africa to assess the susceptibility to tuberculosis in large populations. This collaboration will provide the test population for emerging diagnostic techniques.