Building 75 Opens Its Doors

In June 2008, with support from the 1999 gift by Thanassis and Marina Martinos, the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging completed a 32,000-square-foot expansion into the newly overhauled Building 75 in the Charlestown Navy Yard, nearly doubling its footprint. While the new space welcomed research programs that had outgrown their old quarters in Building 149, including the RF Coil Lab, which continued to develop advanced radiofrequency coils for ultrahigh-field and other MR scanners, much of it was specifically designed for and dedicated to the Center’s emerging molecular imaging program. The new facilities in Building 75 comprised chemistry and biology wet labs and a host of molecular imaging technologies to propel the exciting research envisioned for the program.

As part of the expansion, the Center also installed a groundbreaking imaging system combining MRI and positron emission tomography (PET): the BrainPET scanner. Developed in collaboration with industry partner Siemens Medical Solutions, the first-of-its-kind scanner integrated a prototype PET imaging system into a Siemens Trio 3T MRI system, thus enabling truly simultaneous imaging of anatomical structures and metabolic and molecular processes in the brain. By offering a comprehensive view of tissue anatomy and physiology, the scanner would prove a vital resource for the molecular imaging effort.

The launch of the new space and enhanced facilities marked a major step forward in the Martinos Center’s long history of innovation. The Center was a now a state-ofthe-art, 85,000-square-foot laboratory with approximately 60 faculty investigators and over 100 postdoctoral research fellows and graduate students.

The expansion was dedicated in May 2008 at a ceremony attended by Thanassis and Marina Martinos. Center director Bruce Rosen spoke at the ceremony, acknowledging both the tremendous accomplishment of completing the expansion and the many opportunities the facilities opened for the Center. “This expansion completes Thanassis’ and Marina’s vision for the Martinos Center as a research facility that unites the clinical and imaging expertise of the Massachusetts General Hospital with HST’s strengths in engineering and basic neuroscience,” he said. Thus, the Center officially began a bold new era of research.

The 2008 dedication of Building 75. Back row (L to R): Phillip Clay, Daniel Shannon, Martha Gray, Greg Sorensen, Bruce Rosen. Front row (L to R): Susan Hockfield, Marina Martinos, Thanassis Martinos.

Photo courtesy of Martha Gray